


American Muse, Holy Fool

by Fraudgara



Category: Buzzfeed Unsolved (Web Series), S.W.A.T. (TV 2017), Watcher Entertainment RPF
Genre: Alternate Universe - College/University, Drugged Sex, First Time Blow Jobs, M/M, Marijuana, Recreational Drug Use, Shotgunning, Underage Drinking, Urban Legends, Vine is still a thing, this is 2015
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-06-17
Updated: 2020-06-17
Packaged: 2021-03-04 04:40:20
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 44,779
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/24767872
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Fraudgara/pseuds/Fraudgara
Summary: “You wanna befriends?” Ira’s mouth curved in a way that said he had a better idea of what Eric wanted than he did. He looked up and away out at the sidewalk ahead, his brown eyes floating with the orange and pink skyline until they looked caramel from Eric’s vantage. “I’m willing to call you a cab to get you back to school, but I know how this goes; and I know I’m not gonna kiss you again unless you ask for it. However, I’m not lying to myself or you when I say that if you follow me home today, there’s no way this ends with us beingfriends.”--In his freshman year, a sheltered trust fund baby named Eric meets Ira, a man with drugs, cults, and poetry in his head.
Relationships: Eric/Ira, Ryan Bergara/Shane Madej
Comments: 37
Kudos: 77





	American Muse, Holy Fool

**Author's Note:**

  * For [arostine](https://archiveofourown.org/users/arostine/gifts).



> So literally 3 months ago Ryan and Shane appeared on television for 4 minutes playing as themselves but _different_ and almost immediately I wanted to take whatever crumbs of an existence the S.W.A.T. writers gave them, I wanted to take anything I could glean from their wardrobe, their speech patterns, and their tiny little subplot and run. Of course, I only had one scene in mind: their alleged night together on LSD and a UFO that may or may not have appeared, but along came [arostine](https://archiveofourown.org/users/arostine/profile) with her beautiful mind and a college AU Commission and I was Sold, I tell you, Sold. Let me thank you, Katie, for your patience, for allowing me to go apeshit with this premise and last of all for being the strong plague doctor I've come to know and adore. I genuinely hope this is as fun for you to read as it was to write. 
> 
> Secondly, I must send a very Loud heartfelt thanks to [deanwinchesterissaved](https://archiveofourown.org/users/deanwinchesterissaved) because I have never in all my life attended an American college and haven't set foot on UC Berkeley campus but out of the goodness of her heart, she acted as my location scout by taking perfect photos of actual locations in this fic for me to sap creative license from. If there is anyone to thank for why any of the descriptions of the place featured in this story sound even a little bit accurate to their original counterparts, it's her. 
> 
> And next--oh man--where to find the words? There was a scary moment at least two months ago where I didn't know where this was gonna go and then [loveontherocks](https://archiveofourown.org/users/loveontherocks) came a-knockin' and not only held my hand through a lot of this, but inspired the resolution of this fic and not to mention the title. I literally just had to show up and write at that point. I've already messaged her a repetitive reel of the reasons she is amazing and miraculous and cool but I'm not one to hesitate showing awe and celebration where it's due. 
> 
> Fourthly, any shade thrown at the school itself is more of a blanket statement on most 'old as balls' universities so if you're a shill for Berkleyian history, jog on.
> 
> Finally, the title comes from an article written in 2012 about Neal Cassady who was the muse for what some literary scholars say is the Great American Novel _On the Road_ by Jack Kerouac. He was pretty much an early example of RPF for when your totally straight best friend only lets you fuck him in the ass if it's for counter-culture and poetry.
> 
> [An Eric & Ira Playlist](https://open.spotify.com/playlist/37Z5zC5xcYLWQJJY59PMS3?si=DqWviCPFQGSvam8SoxBxLQ) (optional for the reading experience) that follows the journey of the fic very loosely but believe me when I say that Bigfoot track belongs there.

  
_  
_

> _**June**  
>  _
> 
> _**2015** _

The silver ring on his pinky caught the light of his dad’s crystal liquor decanter. He was almost in his twenties; maybe he could order one of those...

Well, drinking wasn’t that fun anyway--not since they’d moved to Cuba after he graduated, and the only social circle Eric could brag about were his cousins who only smoked hash and grass.

“When we had our talk in your senior year, your mom said _something_ had to have gotten into that brain of yours.”

His dad, forty-something years and a cold sneer of command on his face, Mr. Orlan Vidal was talking through his black and silver moustache, miring through the words like he was wasting them. “Your mom also said that you were going to make good use of yourself, but you’ve squandered _two_ years out of high school--”

“I was thinking I might travel though.” Eric swept his arms out over the black horse-hair armrest, half out of a yawn so the words came out lofty and thick. Travel vlogs were getting pretty popular, and now that they were back in Cali, Eric didn’t really mix with the country club influencers his age, and their solemn, generational _rag chic_ in pale muted colours.

No one was _really_ into film anymore, and if you were, you had to _know_ someone, be perched somewhere in Hollywood waiting for a producer to ignore your lack of experience and fund your vision. Eric had a trust fund coming on his twenty-first birthday, and because of that, he had _plans_...

“Then you _should_ have _actually_ travelled, Eric!” His dad snapped. “You spent two years doing god knows what in the villa basement--”

“It’s called _Youtube_ ,” Eric mumbled firmly. He _hated_ this conversation. There was agony in explaining the feeling he’d gotten when his subscriber count jumped from seven hundred-fifty to eight hundred in the span of a month. He had sat in front of his computer for a good minute staring at the number, picturing eight hundred people standing in that room behind him, watching and waiting in awe and fascination for his next video.

He was hesitant to unpack what that said about his relationship with validation from strangers.

Besides, the comments of his latest video where he’d reviewed the season finale of _Mr. Robot_ were filled with at least twenty people who really seemed to _get_ it. He’d edited a compilation of parallels between Elliot’s journey and that of the narrator of _Fight Club_ and people were really responding. He wanted to keep on with this momentum, wanted to upload daily with new reviews and compilations. It was working for him. He was _going_ to get a big enough audience, he was going to do _this..._

“Well, you’re not a kid anymore _._ It’s time to get an education before your opportunities go to waste _._ ”

He had been thinking about what he’d do for a YouNow stream and hadn’t quite registered the words as they’d landed. Eric froze. “What?!”

His dad had since picked up his phone and started to dial, which was his favourite way of dismissing people. “I thought you’d know to apply for colleges out of common sense, but here we are. I want to see your first acceptance letter in my hand when it arrives,” was his final distracted order.

The beady glass eyes of the elephant in Eric’s dad’s desk sculpture pronounced a laughing judgement at him. Many of the objects in his dad’s corner office liked to take that attitude with him. Smooth, hard glass surfaces had a way of making Eric feel a little lumpy and lacking.

Eric got up and left.

~*~

Eric would then face _three_ rejection letters: one from Booth, one from Wharton, and the last from MIT. All on the very day that he’d learned that most of his peers and friends from high school were beelining straight for business, law, and engineering degrees respectively. And that’s what he was expected to do; snatch up honours at some peer-ranked school so he could hand in his resume with his dad’s Mexican-Cuban import company and land a cushy executive job in trading.

Eric didn’t care about imports or business. He only liked to go back to Cuba once a year because it meant he could hang with his cousins, chill at the villa, and not really have to think about what it meant that he hadn’t been excited about anything until he started making videos.

The _plan_ had been to wait out for his granddad’s trust fund for him to kick in so he could buy his own place in SoCal and really concentrate on growing his channel, but his dad’s obsession with Eric having some bullshit degree was putting a huge damper on any Five-Year-Plan to be a _real_ Youtuber by twenty-one.

It’s possibly why he kinda phoned it in with his application essays and interviews.

So, his dad, with irritability in every pen stroke of his signature on the check he paid the college counsellor, had suggested Eric retake the SATs as a last resort, which stung in that very particular way any kind of ‘I knew you couldn’t do this’ might.

Eric had tried to develop a very specific kind of selective hearing in that regard, but for all his pride, he refused to retake his SATs. Instead he googled undergraduate programs he could get in on merit mostly.

_Describe how the Management, Entrepreneurship, & Technology Program in Engineering and Business at UC Berkeley will help you to achieve your goals and how your background and/or experiences may be a good fit for this program._

He wrote to UC Berkeley just exactly that, and got in. Out of spite of course.

Which, of course, meant he was just doing exactly as he’d been told; so _that_ meant he had to pretend it was his idea from the start and that he _loved everything about it._

> _**September** _
> 
> _**2015** _

Well, Eric _hated_ it from square one.

To start with, his dorm roommate--a gawky-looking environmental science major--had badly upset him with an immediate discourse into the philosophical implication that Eric was causing the Earth pain by simply existing. Eric didn’t like to argue; he’d already _tried_ to keep a succulent last year; it didn’t even live longer than any of his carnival goldfish.

To avoid his roommate, he’d hung out with a book ( _Pictures at a Revolution_ by the great Mark Harris) in the lounge only to find out that nobody he met asked about the book; he tried the gym: no Lakers fans and nearly every mention of music involved some indie band on the rise from Portland. (Surely, someone at this grey-skied hellscape wanted to talk about Skrillex!) Lastly, he’d ruined his favourite suede Toms because no one had had the decency to tell him that all it did in North California was rain.

He called his mom on night three telling her he really thought another trip to Cuba would do him some good because he didn’t belong here, and this _wasn’t working_.

“ _Well, your dad already paid out your housing, sweetie. I know you’re upset right now, but… do you want me to send you that_ espresso _we drank last holiday?”_

“Mama, I’m not _upset._ I’m _outraged!_ I don’t know how to explain to dad that making me imitate people my age isn’t going to make me into one of them. I hate it here! _”_

 _“Should I still send the espresso_?”

“...Yes, thank you.”

God, but he missed his camera; he missed his set up. He wanted to make videos. He kept checking his stats on his phone and trying not to look at his Twitter mentions. He had _tried_. One vlog on his phone about the fact that he was away at college; he’d gotten six minutes in before he switched the camera off, feeling like shit about everything and everyone. His audience wouldn’t want him just rambling off about dorm life and the fact that he hadn’t made any friends or how everyone just _cared_ so damn much about getting into clubs.

So, on Friday, when he was done with his first lecture of the day, he went to the mall and blew a quarter of his weekly allowance on a Canon EOS 70D, a better SIGMA aperture lens he’d read about on _TechRadar_ , and a tripod. He set up on his side of the dorm room and sat on his bed, intending to try vlogging again.

Eric’s roommate had chosen at that very moment to make his presence much more known despite the fact that Eric had glared balefully and sighed a lot since the last time they spoke. “What are you doing?”

“Just...filming a video,” Eric mumbled, twisting the viewfinder toward him and lining the cord up to fit into his MacBook on his bed drawer so he could reach down and record remotely.

“What for? An assignment? I heard the co-curricular clubs are doing intake next week. Is this for that?”

“What? No. I’m not joining any clubs--”

Roommate--Eric had actually forgotten his name--sucked in a sharp breath with a wince. “That’s a bad call. I heard if you wanna get in a research lab, it’s better to know somebody, you get what I mean? You don’t wanna go it alone especially if you want a job when we’re done--”

Eric reached over and switched off the camera. For all the guy’s posters about carbon footprints and the apparent entitlement of humanity interfering with natural habitats, the guy was infringing on Eric’s habitat. He couldn’t do this here.

“You know what? You’re right,” he sighed, unplugging his MacBook and unclipping his camera from the tripod, tucking it under his arm as he slipped into his shoes. “I’m gonna go find a club and join it right now.”

“I don’t think you can just--”

“And I’ll be _really busy_ so no time to talk at all or hang out. Don’t wait up. So sorry.”

When the door shut behind him, Eric spiralled over the thought that he’d forgotten his jacket and that he would rather just keep right on walking down the dorm hall with his camera, hoping to the god of the Californian sun (Anthony Kiedis?) that he wasn’t about to ruin yet another pair of suede Toms.

It wasn’t raining right _then_ at least, but the pavement was slick with that morning’s rain. The trees were drooping with the damp as the people around him rushed between lectures. Mainly, it was _cold_ with a solid breath-taking wind sweeping down from around the sky-reaching stone wall of the Campanile clock tower. He saw the front door open at the top of a set of steps and a man with a ladder exit just as a particularly icy shiver got in under Eric’s polo. He ran indoors.

He almost dropped his camera as he nearly tripped over a pile of cracked drywall on the floor. It took him all of five minutes to realize that he’d walked right past the reception. He’d walked by the clocktower all week on his way to his lectures, and it had been constantly crowded with tourists. Now it was silent and empty.

Eric stood very still, looking at the light through the windows of the doors and the occasional passing student. The muted shift of the wind thundered against the stone and the windows like a long quavering moan and Eric shivered, tightening his grip on his camera. He was getting an idea.

He held up the camera awkwardly and switched it on, hitting record as he looked into the lens. He hadn’t checked, but he had a pretty good suspicion there weren’t any vlogs of anyone going up the clocktower when it was empty. No time to waffle about it; he could edit in an intro later and explain…

“I’ve just managed to infiltrate the very famous Campanile clocktower--”

His voice echoed in the empty stone room, and his expression in the viewfinder looked lost. He hit the red button again. Silence.

What was he supposed to say about a place he knew nothing about?

The beep of the camera’s record button was loud in the reception as he pointed the lens at the elevator. “This clocktower is the biggest tourist spot in the whole of UC Berkeley and here I am, all alone in this big old building.”

When the elevator doors closed behind him, Eric pointed the camera at himself. “A building _so_ old people actually pay to see it. What is it about this place that gets people lining up outside the door?”

He stepped outside the elevator into the empty stairwell, watching his step off the metal gap. He opened his mouth to continue on, droning in some filler before he could get to any b-roll footage at the top plus his reaction. That’d be the video. Or at least that was what he meant to do until the very moment he breathed in and the scent of it hit him.

Someone was smoking weed.

It stopped him in his tracks like only nostalgia could. He was already thinking of his dad’s villa in Cuba, in the eastern suite, a couple of his cousins laughing, wrecked out of their minds while Eric tried valiantly not to cough out a lung. Incredulity at the thought that he was about to actually catch someone holding on campus ( _possibly someone in faculty_!), pushed him forward up the stone steps until he was past the second landing. Dust, soil, and aerosol paint and then cannabis smoke, sour but earthy.

The stone walls and rafters seemed to emit a faint hum, emotionless and monotone, softly and callously singing a drone about the people who used to occupy the space. The overcast sky outside the stone walls and bars of the clocktower roof spilled nothing but cool light against the dust motes floating from the rafters and Eric thought suddenly of books he read as a kid. It might have been the observation deck itself but Eric took it all in at once as his eyes came to rest on the figure tucked into a far window.

It startled Eric to see someone sitting so elevated, stretched against the capacity of the low rafters and iron bars against the stone window with one impossibly long leg propped on the window sill. He made quite a profile lit by the pale grey afternoon, his eyes fixed on the phone in his hand as his thumb ran down the screen slowly. His other hand came up to his mouth, a blunt tucked between his index finger and his middle. He took a full, healthy drag, tipping the ash out a gap in the iron bars.

Eric watched him hold in that inhale with a quiet swell of his own chest, feeling a daring empathy and fascination for the man’s energy. Eric must have made enough clatter climbing up the steps to be noticed but the guy remained serene and oblivious to his observer, his mouth curved up in a fair little smile, as the smoke poured over his bottom lip in a thick, lazy cloud.

It was only as the man’s gaze fell like a dying leaf in Autumn right on him that Eric smiled hesitantly. He received no smile in response; just a slow gesture to pluck a set of earbuds out, letting them fall to his lap where his phone was still resting as he continued to blink down at Eric.

“Are you…” Eric began, mouth dry. “Are you a ghost?”

Confusion and incredulity swept into a carefully blank expression until he broke eye contact with Eric to glance a bit askance at the camera in his hand. He realised right then that he hadn’t switched it off.

“Sorry, I didn’t see you at first and you looked like--the way you’re sitting up there. I was--I was filming a video.”

“A video about ghosts?” His voice was charmingly accented in this inexplicable way, as if he were speaking around a lisp but the cadence was beckoning; on the verge of some joke Eric felt he’d never been told. Eric smiled for real, as if he’d been compelled, and the guy’s eyebrows curved upward.

“No, I’m...I saw the tower was empty and wanted to do a vlog--”

“Don’t mind me then,” was the reply he got, offered firmly as the man brought the tip of the blunt to his lips again. His eyes were glazed and decadent; something about that made Eric feel a little embarrassed for him. Like this person could really walk around in public making bedroom eyes at unsuspecting strangers.

Eric swallowed. He had been cold only a moment before, but the small tower roof was blistering sharp breezes on the fever of his cheeks. “I don’t know anything about this place. You’re not--you’re not faculty, are you?”

The guy huffed a laugh around another mouthful of smoke, practically coughing as he set one hand on the iron bars to brace himself. “Oh my god, fuck no.”

Eric, feeling heartened by that, smiled bigger and held up the camera. Might not be too bad having a stranger in the vlog, especially one so clearly eccentric. “Name’s Eric. What’s yours?”

“Ira,” was his reply around a big, sardonic smile. “Are you a _youtuber,_ Eric?”

“Yeah,” Eric replied proudly. He might have preened. “You mind being in my vlog, Ira?”

Perhaps it was the clumsiness of it mixed with the fact that Ira clearly didn’t seem to care how he did it, but he swung a leg down and landed with a firm stomp off the window sill. He was still smiling but Eric’s back hit the iron gates protecting the clocktower bells as he was suddenly and very terrifyingly aware that the guy was a whole shoulder and head taller than him and was currently crowding him back, smelling like indica brush, generic laundry soap, and vaguely like cardamom.

“How old are you?”

“I’m turning twenty in November.”

“Here.”

Maybe Eric blinked; maybe he blacked out. All he knew in quick seconds was that a long-fingered hand had curled around his wrist as Ira tipped the still lit blunt into his hand to hold in the same movement he used to take the camera away so he could look into the lens, a wider, but crooked smile on his mouth. “Here’s a fun fact for you and your audience, Eric. You see those bars there?” He twisted the camera around in one hand with an easy practice to point it at the long observation deck windows.

Ira twisted the camera back to himself, his dark brown hair a long silky swathe over his ears and forehead. “Not that long ago, back when these windows were empty, a young man sat on a bench right where little Eric is now standing. After sitting there silently reading for only moments, he quietly laid his math textbook neatly on the bench beside him before running straight for that window--” Ira’s towering frame twisted with a surprising energy, a striking figure that was all legs even in cuffed jeans.

Eric was stunned, barely able to react when Ira thrust the camera at the bars, only stopping short with a clever-looking catch of his palm to the stone edge, his voice taking on a deep storyteller’s timbre. “...with one quick _unstoppable_ force, the boy threw himself--the newspapers would use the word _‘vaulted’_ like he was out to beat an athletic record--off the tower. No explanation. No note. Only the pieces of him that scribbled the ground could tell any story. He wasn’t the first, and between the day this clock tower was built to the year they installed those bars, there’s no way he was the last.”

Eric gaped. “You’re saying this--is this place _haunted_?”

Ira dropped his arm from the bars. He pointed the camera at Eric and his eyes were hooded, relaxed, but gleaming with something fierce and rousing. “Oh, Ghosts aren’t real, pretty baby,” was his soft reply.

Eric couldn’t react to that; his ears were so hot. He dropped his gaze, immediately rattled to realise that he was still holding the blunt; smoke too close to his fingers. He darted a glance at Ira who, upon seeing Eric look down at the blunt, now watched with some invested intrigue as Eric put it in his mouth, sucking in a tight hit.

Eric waited. Ira didn’t say anything.

“That’s pretty fucked up,” Eric mumbled after a protracted moment, hissing in the taste of it. It had to be cut with tobacco or something. There was a faint chalky taste. “Why d’you think he did that?”

“Dunno.” Ira hit the red button on the camera before twisting the viewfinder closed, and walking over with a hand out to take the blunt back and take another hit, he tossed his hair out of his eyes, leaning up to look at the sixty or so bells on the roof above them. “Something about being so close to the sky makes people want to act like they got wings.”

Silence shivered through Eric, a close and stark magnetism in him for Ira’s entire thing. Felt strange to stand in a heady new reality, his mind wandering slowly in and out of focus with the way Ira decisively handed back the camera, and the bloom of a thought growing right out of his forehead. It danced there, waiting for Eric to open his mouth and let it land on his tongue.

A thought with wings.

“Do you think if I…” The idea felt like a tang of iron, smelled so strongly of the dry cold. “If I tossed my camera off the tower, we’d see what he saw?”

Ira’s eyebrows rose again and he looked at Eric like he’d just opened a door to his own apartment and found someone else living there. It felt like clarity to be sitting in the dispassionate edge of the smoke in Ira’s blunt. “That thing looks expensive,” he said, nodding languidly at the camera.

“I don’t care,” Eric replied stoutly. “Think it’ll work?”

Ira’s smile was mystified and he stubbed the blunt on the iron gate behind Eric, leaning in with an easy familiarity. Eric didn’t lean away and wondered if it was the weed. His lungs felt like the folded flaps of an accordian, squeezing in and spreading when he exhaled.

“Before we do this…” Ira began in hushed excited tones. “I should probably tell you…”

Eric was distracted. Ira’s skin looked oddly like the blonde damask curtains in Eric’s mom’s work room; his lips like the faded bleed of pink on the petals of a Marpacifico. He didn’t know why he thought of that, but he was suddenly terribly aware that with Ira standing inches away he could reach out, _touch_. See if there was silk on the edge of his smile.

“What... was in that blunt…?” Eric murmured, his voice seething out of him, lost and ageless.

Ira had the grace to look concerned. “That’s uh...what I was about to tell you. This was soaked in PCP.” He held the offending object up. “You ever done it before? I didn’t expect you to just take a drag like that…”

“I thought it was just weed.”

“That’s... _fair_.”

“Am I dying?” Eric whispered; he didn’t like the feeling in his throat when he used his voice. “Am I... _dying?”_

Ira’s smile was infectious because it spread like a white pool, making his mouth so beautiful, lips parted. “Nah, little guy. You’re a genius. We’re about to toss your camera through those bars.”

~*~

There was a fragility to the comedown and Eric came to in front of his MacBook that evening, sitting in a room full of other people. He gasped, uttering a faint pained sound as he moved his spine. He had been bent over his screen, asleep with his eyes open staring at the screen; he was staring at the “Upload complete” command box on his studio page on Youtube.

Shocked and sharply aware of being around other people in this very vulnerable moment. Eric sat up in his seat. He remembered it all vividly down to the moment he’d rushed into a reserved study room in Moffitt Library, ignoring the present occupants so he could have “a quiet place to edit”.

Eric glanced up, already a little mortified, but the other students had clearly elected to ignore him while they continued with their group study on the other side of the table. He was so thirsty and his palms were oddly sticky with drying sweat.

 _Ira_.

Eric felt around for his things, remembered Ira’s fingers reaching down into the leaves of the bushes on the east side of the tower to grab the piece of the camera that had the memory card in it. His heart thudded up sharply and Eric had to sit very still for a terrified moment. He was present, lucid, but his body hadn’t caught up.

“ _Shouldn’t have worked but it did. I hope that’s the last of the footage you needed.”_

The video was ready to go. He only needed to hit play. He nervously adjusted his earbuds as he drew his thumb up the touchpad to the play button. Eric was dumbstruck as it loaded up. A ten minute video?! When had he recorded voice-over? The shot was shaky as he walked up the stairs with his _own_ voice narrating his exploring the tower alone. The open break of the sky through the windows of the observation deck blasted a glare against the lense. There was then a glimpse, for only a millisecond, of Ira, looking down at his phone. A jump-cut close-up of his lips moving with a filtered overlay that was practically orange broke the video’s mood as if the introduction of Ira had changed the way the world looked. The voiceover was Ira’s then, recounting the story of the young undergraduate.

“ _This is a supernatural story,_ ” Eric’s voice in the video filled in. “ _But not in the way you think_ …”

The video cut to a shaky shot pointed at Eric as Ira’s strange little story about the guy who threw himself off the tower began. It was almost genius; the editing made it look like Eric was the boy in the story as the point of view switched from looking _at_ him to _being_ him as the camera sped toward the iron bars; up and over, swinging in a dizzy live wave burned by the lense flare of the white and grey sky to the stones of the campus buildings.

Then there was the gorgeousness of seeing the whole of the campus arranged around the screen like a spinning inside of a snowglobe; absolutely magnificent, and a little band of glow on the horizon, like a spill held out to light a candle, reflected again in the round pool by the Hearst Building; a round punch-bowl of the dark. The cut as the camera visibly reached the ground and by some stroke of inspiration, Eric had added a white noise effect.

As the smash cut switched abruptly to Ira looking at the camera, thumbs just within the shot as he appeared to be balancing whatever he was filming with on the ground across one of the campus walkways. Seemingly satisfied, he backed up and strode for a bench behind himself, dropping into a comfortable sitting position, one leg folded over the other. The camera barely caught Ira’s eyeline, but it looked intentional; as if Ira were this mysterious and cold spectre recounting an incident he’d seen himself.

“ _Something about being so close to the sky makes people want to act like they got wings._ ”

He took a tin out of his blazer pocket and opened it, lifting out a pre-rolled joint to his lips. Eric rubbed his palms against his jeans; he was stunned, just _awed_ as he watched Ira’s index finger flick a Zippo open and tip the flame against the tip. He was slow about it: thoughtful, measured and cool.

Just in time for the cherry on the tip of his joint to glow, the low and echoing hum of the tower’s bells went off.

“ _Sather tower has sixty-one bells,_ ” Ira said in a clear, velvety voice in Eric’s ears. Eric’s jaw dropped. They had recorded V.O. for this as well and he’d edited it in to sync. It was a little off, but it added to the mood of the video. “ _But only one of them has a carving of Callisto on it. For those of you who don’t know_ \--” Ira took a delicate drag of his joint, and a shallow cloud spilled through his teeth as he continued “-- _Callisto is a character in Greek mythos. Zeus threw her into the night sky in a heartbroken rage_.”

The shot shifted. Eric remembered doing this. He remembered the feeling of the stone on his knuckles, the way his feet almost stumbled on the brick path as he lifted his phone from where he’d crouched low to observe this whole thing.

“She broke his heart?” he’d asked and his voice in the video sounded strangely young as he carried the shot across the walkway toward Ira. In the video, Ira smiled a very warm smile up at him, his eyes turning to crescents as Eric approached and it was strange to feel-- even in these hot sober seconds; in these aftermath minutes of barely remembering the fever dream that had orchestrated this video--to feel the way that smile made him feel when he was running on PCP. swimming in miracles and tangible expressions of art in every angle he got of Ira.

“The stories say her father chopped up their love child and tried to serve him up in a stew,” Ira reported with a shrug and his smile curved differently before he took another puff of his joint. “Macabre and romantic, but probably less so than an ancient god reaching through centuries to toss a poor young underg into the sky whenever the bell tolls.”

A breathy helpless laugh stuttered out of Eric in the video like someone had punched the air right out of him. Current Eric felt for him as he shivered from the image that that had put in his head.

“This is…amazing,” he whispered, weirded out to be so awed by his own work. He scrolled down absently. How long had the video even been up? It was dark outside the windows of the study room, but he couldn’t even remember finishing this.

 _Oh_.

The video had twenty thousand views after having been up for just an hour! No, wait, The upload time said six p.m. It was now a little after eight. Shell-shocked and a little afraid he was seeing things, Eric refreshed the page and he let out a sharp breath when he looked at the view count.

~*~

Apparently at some juncture, he’d managed to get Ira’s number on his phone which was a blessed relief because Eric wouldn’t have known how to find him otherwise at eight in the evening on a Friday. He was racing down the library steps anyway, not even sure where he meant to go with his phone tucked against his ear, arms full of his computer and broken camera.

God, he needed water.

Ira’s voice was in his ear again. “Y’ello?”

“ _H-heyy_.” _Oh my god._ Eric heard his own voice come out of him all wrong _; too desperately happy; too much..._

“What’s your sign, little guy?” Ira queried languidly as if continuing a previous conversation, as if they hadn’t just spent over four hours apart.

“What?” he gasped, breathlessly pushing against the entrance hall doors with his shoulder, stumbling into the night air. His face was all hot again.

“I have this theory about you--”

“Dude,” he interrupted, unable to contain his excitement. “The video is at _fifty_ thousand views! It’s been up for only two hours! All the comments are going crazy; I think someone with a verified account linked the video on Twitter! They love it; the format...your story.”

Silence on the other end. Eric stood in the middle of the yellow lamp-lit campus road, listening to the sound of his and Ira’s breathing. He wasn’t even sure how he expected Ira to react. He didn’t know this guy at all, but for some reason, his heart was racing; he needed him to understand--this was _everything_ to him.

“I know,” he replied at last. “I watched it. If I hadn’t been involved in its making, I wouldn’t have believed an edit like that could happen in two hours.”

Eric laughed, breathlessly. Stupidly pleased. “Well...PCP is a hell of a drug.”

Ira laughed, and it was immediately Eric’s new favourite thing about him. “Aww, but then we broke your camera,” was Ira’s soft reply, cadent with regret. “How we gonna give them _more_?”

Eric was elated. “Don’t worry about that! My mom’ll send me enough to replace it! _Fifty thousand views._ I’m--I only had eight hundred subscribers this morning, but I just broke two thousand.”

He felt like he was waiting in bated breath between Ira’s thinking silences. At last Ira said, “There’s somewhere else I’d like to show you; bring your sparkly new camera and those bright eyes to the northeast corner of the campus--”

“Monday!” Eric blurted out and caught himself. He hadn’t even had to ask. Ira wanted to see him again, and wanted to do another video together. “I can get a new one as early as Monday morning, if you want, I mean? If you’re busy...I…”

Ira’s laugh was like an ancient rolling hill, fuzzy in the reception of Eric’s phone. God, that was a treat. “It’s a date then. Do you know the Hearst Mining Building?”

“I can find it. The mall opens at nine. If the side effects of PCP don’t kill me tonight, I can be there at ten.”

“Well...don’t die,” was Ira’s laughing reply before he hung up. In the sharp evening breeze, Eric expected a shiver, but it was then he realised he had been wearing Ira’s grey blazer this whole time.

~*~

The white and red arched windows of the Hearst Mining Building were already visible behind the yellowed leaves of the surrounding trees. Eric practically trotted toward the wide clearing of red brick surrounding the glimmering fountain pool. It was a warmer day, but Eric had shrugged Ira’s jacket on anyway, liking the look of it with his white t-shirt. It was large on him, but he’d seen Ira slip the sleeves up to his elbows so he’d done the very same, marveling a little at how big it made his shoulders look.

Ira laughed when he saw him, eyes squinted in the sun and arms bare in a black button-down and blue jeans. He had a large green book bag that looked heavy slung over his shoulder. It was a vision of a greeting that made Eric need to take a moment before he could say anything. Ira reached out and fixed the collar of his own damn jacket where it was folded upward. He made no indication of wanting it back.

“Hey,” Eric managed breathlessly at the tailend of that.

“ _Hey_ ,” Ira replied with a smile as if Eric had complimented him with poetry. “Wanna see a dead body?”

“What?!” said Eric.

“I’m one hundred percent kidding,” he replied quickly with the same smile. “Really diggin’ that excited look on your face, by the way.” He then shoved his hands in both pockets as he inclined his head toward the back of the building. “Come on, you can get your B-roll later. We only have a short window to get in!”

It was as Eric followed after Ira, three steps for every one of his strides, that he caught himself watching the effect of Ira on his environment. He loped easily and confidently, ducking under tree branches, moving leaves out of the way as they descended down a hill through loose dirt, mulch and moss. He really was _so_ damn tall and it was charming to watch him make it work, which was a weird thing in general to think about someone.

“What we’re about to do is kind of illegal,” Ira murmured, slowing down as they came around what Eric expected to be some kind of maintenance locker. However, as Ira crouched into the weeds and dead brush beside it to dig around in his bag, Eric hopped off the concrete curb and was surprised to see it was an elevated, grimy, metal cage door with a fortified latch cover and two padlocks over the latch. His gaze was only torn from the door because Ira chose at that exact moment to unearth a large pair of bolt cutters from his bag.

“When you say ‘kind of’ illegal...?” Eric murmured, still following as Ira set to work fitting the bolt cutter against the top padlock. “Did you mean _‘very’_?”

Ira laughed and shot Eric a look that could only be described as a deliberate challenge just as his fists clamped fully over the bolt cutter’s handles and squeezed. Eric stared as he struggled briefly; as his arms went taut and tense before there was an alarming snap. Ira tossed the padlock over his shoulder and it clanked against the stone ground by Eric’s feet.

“Hope you’re keeping lookout,” said Ira through gritted teeth without turning to look, and Eric looked away quickly. He twisted around in an almost too-quick motion and nearly fell as he looked back at massive, brown-framed windows, frosted and packed with boxes. He scanned the countless windows of the building beside it, seeing only black glare.

“There’s no one,” he mumbled.

Ira was quiet. The only sound between them was the scrape of the bolt cutter’s teeth as Ira seemed to be trying to get the fit just right before he could cut into the second lock. Then, after a low grunt and a belaboured sigh, the other padlock hit the ground.

Eric turned and Ira was standing there, a really fantastic image in black under the glow of the orange-leaved trees surrounding them. Maybe the fact that he was so tall in the shaded cover of the stone door alcove or how his features looked so stark in the mid-morning sun that made him think it was the film enthusiast in him that just wanted to get that image on camera; clip it in with other things in Eric’s strange life that made him feel attached to something bigger, holier.

He was definitely aware that between the swelter of fear, anxiety, and excitement of this new little escapade and the aftermath of their video hitting one hundred fifty thousand views just this morning, there was a spacious middle that had him feeling a little giddy and stupid around Ira in a way he was worried Ira could see.

He took his camera out so he could look through the viewfinder at Ira and the door, safer in a degree of separation as he hit ‘record’.

Ira cocked his head as he let the bolt cutter handle slide down in his fist until the teeth of it hit the ground. “You afraid of the dark?” he asked and Eric’s blood went cold.

Because he sort of was, but also because...

“Is this some kind of underground storage?” he prompted.

Ira didn’t answer; he set his hand on the edge of it, prying it open so it dislodged the rusted over buildup on the doorjamb. “Only sixteen years after the turn of the twentieth century, what was once a mining club evolved into a department until a professor got an idea in his head…”

Eric stared, camera raised, as Ira fully tugged the door open, letting its bent rusty metal swing back into his other hand. He looked right up at blackness; up into what could only be described as a _cave_.

“...to dig an _actual_ mine shaft nine hundred feet right underneath the campus.”

Ira bent down and dug in his large bag once more and pulled out a large flashlight, hitting it quickly against his leg before switching it on, whirling its spotlight right into the black void of the mine entrance. Eric gaped.

He was really looking at an actual _mining_ tunnel tucked right into a hillside in a university he was attending. He could already smell the muddy wet earth packed along the spaces between its wooden rafters and the warm, wet rocks jutting from the long pathway that looked more like a long stretch of stagnant black water.

“They really just built this here…?” Eric mumbled, drawing closer.

“You gotta picture the state of the world back then, Eric,” Ira replied, and beckoned him closer with one long-fingered hand, holding the flashlight high enough for Eric to walk under his arm, which he did. “Where a dean of a university could send gangs of students down below with pickaxes; just a horde of young, bright minds and able bodies to be funnelled through a vanity project like this without impunity.”

Eric stepped fully into what felt like a canopy of Ira, the toes of his shoes touching the dust build up and dry-cracked stone of the entrance. “You said nine hundred feet. That’s gotta be at least two blocks away?”

“Not anymore.”

“Huh?”

“They drilled too close to the fault. Over half of it collapsed sometime in the nineteen-thirties. Who’s to say there weren’t hundreds of undergraduates bent and distracted in their work in there when the mud and rock came down?”

Eric silently pointed his camera at the splash of light Ira shone on the ceilings of the cave. Wary of the soft mud dripping black water droplets into the pool on the floor.

“You know,” Ira said softly as Eric’s gaze then followed the beam of the flashlight so far down, the shadows of rocks looked like figures peering around out of the dark, waiting for him. “Fraternities used to lock their pledges in here overnight.”

He said it in a way that made Eric suck in a sharp breath. He glanced up at Ira, surprised a little at their proximity; rattled by how Ira gave him an easy smile; too searching a gaze for there to be any malice in it. He still felt this nagging disquiet, perhaps a residual vestige of anxiety or having read too many Chuck Palahnuik novels, or he was really one compilation edit for _Mr. Robot_ too many.

“You’re not…” he began, already embarrassed. “Are you…”

Ira’s mouth curved with delighted sarcasm. “You’re not about to ask me if I’m a ghost again, are you?”

Eric coughed back a laugh, but it came out sounding panicky, desperate because it echoed in the dark of the mine entrance. “I don’t know I just keep thinking that I’m gonna wake up one day and you’ll be sitting across from me in an armchair, about to tell me that you’re--”

His brow furrowed. “That I’m what?”

Eric wasn’t even interested in the mine at all. He was more concerned with the strange implacable heartbreak he felt to suddenly say out loud the thing he’d been secretly wondering from the moment he’d come to in front of his Macbook last night. A thing you couldn’t just say to people. The sort of thing that sounded crazy. “I’m scared you’re gonna tell me that you’re all in my head.”

Ira’s smile dropped slowly; thoughtfully. “What makes you think I’m only in your head?”

An ancient breeze, staid and hollow shivered out of the mine, smelled of dizzy-sweet rust and earth. Eric shrugged. “Because I took PCP for the first time yesterday? Because it was the most creative and productive I’ve ever been? Because I’m not good at making friends? Because you’re so cool!? Why are you even _helping_ me? _Why did you bring me here_?”

“Well…” said Ira as he dropped his arm. He wasn’t smiling anymore at all and Eric lowered his camera, a little crestfallen. “PCP can distort perception and logic, so let’s try a little logic, all right?”

“Okay?”

“Would someone in your head want to kiss you the way that I want to right now?” Ira asked like it was the most obvious thing on earth.

Eric flushed right up to his roots, felt the heat climb in a terrible flood. He opened his mouth and closed it before spluttering out a weak, “ _Yes_?”

Ira’s eyes squinted incredulously, a laugh spilling out of him. He ducked his head and leaned low, seamlessly drew close to Eric with a soft little breath like he was bringing in a sigh. “So much for logic then. It’s only been a weekend and I can’t stop thinking about you. Where’s the logic in that?”

“I don’t know; it’s hard to think around you.” Eric confessed, but he didn’t move, awash with curiosity and marvelling a little at how it felt okay to want something so dreamy and uncertain before Ira breathed out a ragged and surprisingly nervous sound.

“Wow well, if I’m in your head and you’re in mine, then…”

“...then who’s driving the car?” Eric mumbled only feeling completely stupid about it until Ira’s laughing smile brushed his cheek.

His lips parted over Eric's. The kiss went from a simple testing pressure to hotter and hungrier--deeper even--so quickly and more deliberate. Eric tried to put what he knew about kissing girls together with this; with Ira's flat chest hitching nervously against his, his shoulder sharp and pressed against Eric's, almost hurting, rougher than Eric was used to but still very slow and very tentative since this was kind of secret, and sort of like some part of Eric was waiting for this.

This was a whole new trip. This wasn’t why his dad sent him to school. It wasn’t what Eric imagined when he’d started his Youtube channel.

But this...this was... good.

Eric’s camera hand was trapped between them while his other hand clutched the fabric of Ira’s t-shirt, feeling the rise and fall of Ira’s ribs, testing the idea that this could be--what it was becoming. Ira didn’t seem about to leap away from him and declare him a bad kisser; rather his one hand slipped around Eric’s neck, pressing an explorative thumb along his collar bone as Eric breathed hard through his nose, testing the touch of his tongue’s scraping over Ira’s teeth. The excitement won out for Eric when Ira made a coaxing sound, low in his throat, and he tasted him. All the flavours of his smoke and something that was just so implacably _Ira._

Eric crowded Ira backwards until his back hit the stone border. He felt Ira’s smile build against his lips and the sharp breath Ira sucked in before his arm wound around Eric easily, pulling him close enough that Eric felt Ira’s belt dig into his stomach as he balanced on the tip of his toes..

“...could get used to _this_ ,” Ira said on Eric’s lips and Eric breathed the words in, wondering with wild horror what the ever loving fuck he was going to do.

Because yeah, _this_ was all he wanted to do now and no one good had ever built a Youtube channel like this.

Ira’s fingers were soft on his neck, hot on his nape under the collar of Ira’s jacket. He coaxed Eric’s tongue into his mouth with his own, closing his lips on him in a hungry motion and Eric melted.

Maybe it was the warm, slightly sour, raw earth air coming from the mine’s entrance or the distant sound of people passing at the top of the hill, or the clear presence of a hundred dark windows of the buildings behind them, but Eric got too far in his own head too quickly.

He was anxious as he broke away, which was stupid because there wasn’t anything _wrong_ with kissing Ira instead of filming the inside of a wet, decrepit mine with stories of the bodies of students trapped in the old grey mud in the fine edges of Eric’s imagination. All of that circled the _real_ stuff Eric was going to keep reliving, the texture of Ira’s hair for one, and the way he’d extricated himself when Eric paused, leaning back against the stone barrier, tracing a gaze under hooded eyelids at Eric, and Eric became terrifyingly aware that he had no clue what to do with a guy. And Ira was so _much_ guy, body stretched like taffy and looking the very image of everything Eric had been told _not_ to want.

“Maybe we should finish the video?” he gasped shakily.

“Whatever you want,” said Ira, pushing the door open so Eric could pass him and clamber up into the mine’s entrance.

When Eric was anxious, he liked to talk. So, he did as they clambered over thick stones, avoiding suspicious pools of grey water. When Ira would glance at him, Eric couldn’t help watching how Ira’s flushed lips and slopey sharp eyes squinted amusement at him while he waved his camera’s view between the both of them as he spoke. “You know, if there’s a bunch of bones trapped at the very end of the mine, do you think that’s why it’s weirdly warm? I read someplace that decomposition gives off a heat. I’m just imagining all these years, the heat of decay warming up the mud, keeping it soft…”

“You’ve got a sick little mind, don’t you?” Ira remarked laconically, switching on the flashlight again and waving its beam back and forth in the dark.

Eric was beside himself. “I was just--”

“Oh no, don’t get me wrong.” Ira looked back at him before giving the lens of the camera an appreciative glance, speaking softly. “I’m just getting used to the fact that I’m talking to someone who won’t get defensive and hysterical when I tell him all these things. I told you about a boy who died on the campanile, and of course ghost stories are fun if no one’s responsible, but what if I told you that the school you’re enrolled in has a count of six thousand pieces of human remains on campus?”

“What?”

“And that every single one of those human remains is Native American.”

“Jesus...” Eric exclaimed.

Ira pursed his lips, watching him; there was a different flush on him now. Was he upset? “You don’t care,” he stated delicately.

“Hold on,” Eric spluttered. “I _care_. Why wouldn’t I?”

Ira’s eyebrows rose, a slow dawn on something different. Eric had never met anyone whose gaze looked right into his eyes, bored open questions he was lifting the answers for himself. “The fame of a school like Cal rests on its collections; its buildings; the people who’ve _been_ here. Don’t tell me when you enrolled, it wasn’t for the prestige.”

Eric frowned. “It wasn’t. I didn’t even want to do this whole university thing, I--look, you’re telling me people know about this? People in charge of the school know about this? How are they letting that happen?”

“All right, I believe you. It’s nice to instigate some freshman outrage,” Ira remarked, giving a particularly wry smile, which looked sadly very at home on his face. “Eric, you’re gonna understand that there are a lot of people in charge who know so many terrible things they have the power to change and will do nothing about it. And when you try to make change, you’ll get to know a little bit about the words _voter suppression_.”

Eric looked out into the rest of the mine, feeling a strange panic rise in his stomach. Maybe the idea that there were human remains buried under the mud kissing his shoe soles right then felt all the more real now that Ira had a whole new story of six thousand people--human beings--with a goddamn university campus swallowing the memory of them whole. “How did they--why so many…?”

Ira followed his stare. “I know you’re imagining that it’s just a question of the university’s founders finding a lovely location to build their school and covering the dirt housing the bodies of thousands of lost loved ones with concrete, but that’s not the case.”

Eric turned the camera back on him. He was too close, but he didn’t care; maybe the low angle would make this hit the viewer as hard as it was hitting him. “How’d they get the bodies?”

“Nearly seven decades ago, an archaeologist dug deep into the wet clay of Fresno County and felt a portion of the soil give way to something _harder_.”

Eric was rapt all over again; the dry and bitter cynicism in Ira’s tones did nothing to take from the fact that he was a hell of a storyteller.

“Bones, Eric. Hundreds of them. From the ooze, the archaeologist pulled partially complete human skeletons of two adults and a male teenager from a depth of seven feet, near the town of Firebaugh. The year was nineteen-fifty-one. A few decades after our school was founded.”

“So…?”

“ _So_ he handed it all over to what would soon become this school’s Hearst Museum of Anthropology. Then with an avid additional effort at collecting any remains found all over the state of California, the university managed to acquire the bones of people. People with families, descendants. Just for bragging rights. Who has six thousand pairs of dead thumbs and the biggest collection of Native American remains and artifacts in the country?” Ira hooked a thumb up and pointed it upwards at the campus buildings towering over the top of the hill. “ _We_ do.”

Eric pursed his lips pointing the camera up where Ira had pointed fleetingly. “...Where are the remains being kept?”

Ira paused, a reading look, bated breath, on the verge of inspiration. “What would you do then? If you found them?”

“I’d take photos; find a way to livestream…” Eric was incredulous. “You think other people would just be all right with this?”

Ira reached out and plucked the camera out of Eric’s hand and aimed it at him. “No one fucking cares about dead people, Eric.”

Eric watched his expression, trying to read the reason behind that wry, sad smile while Ira kept pressing down on the zoom until Eric felt self-conscious and looked away, a little dejected.

“Why would that be funny to you?” he mumbled.

Ira didn’t lower the camera. “I’m _not_ laughing.”

Eric thought about it. In the larger scope of things, _would_ people care? He’d seen the protesters at the front of Cal; the locals talking about Wall Street and the venom in poverty and he thought of how he would probably walk by them; probably avert his gaze like something in him was braced carefully on a teetering melting object. He thought of how often he’d done that in Cuba, his gaze out of his father’s villa passing with a very practiced skill over the edges of the slums; never interested.

And here he was, standing in the underground mud and history of a beautiful campus filled with secrets as cold and devastating as the money that silenced it.

Fuck, the world couldn’t be that broken.

The sound of the shutter widening filled their tense quiet before Ira said, “I wanted this moment, _here_ , and _you_ on the very _precipice_ of understanding that the world under your pricey little shoes demands change.”

“I feel like you’re mocking me again.” Eric swallowed thickly. “That’s not fair. You’re the first person I’ve met who talks about any of this stuff.”

“Do you…” Ira began, backing away, camera still pointed at him. “...think I crawled into society knowing it was garbage?”

Eric was silent. He shook his head.

“And so,” Ira continued. “You, like I once did, are about to embark on a journey and I’m honoured to be there to watch. I can imagine your viewers feel the same? Just let the people watching know that your mind is open...”

It struck Eric like a siren, like it felt more tangible to think of his viewers as partners in this realisation. Like he could share with both them and Ira, if they were willing to learn. “Of _course_ I’m open. I just don’t know what to do about it.”

Ira lowered the camera finally, shutting the viewfinder and his smile was back to tender sardonicism. “This is just my personal opinion, but I think we should do drugs about it.”

~*~

Ira lived far off-campus in South Berkeley, practically on the fringes of Oakland. After Eric’s insistence that they grab the B-roll while the sun was high, it was probably four p.m by the time they caught a cab to someplace on Carleton heading toward Sacramento street, and stopped at a food truck for some hot dogs and drinks. Eric wasn’t sure if there had ever been a time he’d eaten and walked at the same time, but either way, this _felt_ new. It was nice. They strolled; there was no hurry because Ira had this slow, percolating vibe about him that felt infectious in the way that Eric had only become slowly more aware of just how far out they’d walked as the sun started to set. He was just so distracted as he peppered Ira with questions with a bright pathogen of energy he’d caught.

The more Eric talked, the more he expected Ira to show some sign that he was tired of his company, but he kept his stride slow to walk close to Eric, smiling at the middle distance with a sharp squint Eric was really beginning to like the most. He kept thinking of how Ira had kissed him like it was the simplest thing in the world, wondering vaguely if he’d fucked up somehow, cutting it short to explore the mine, like maybe Ira might never try again.

It was hard to broach the subject of trying to kiss a guy you liked when he had a hot dog in his mouth.

“I know you’re avoiding it, but I think you should ask,” Ira said right then, and Eric was halfway through a gulp of Dr. Pepper.

He uttered a garbled noise he meant to be, “What?”

“You keep asking me about the city, about the university, about the books I read; what I do to fill the day. I’d have half a mind to think you’re a journalist deep down under all that business major if you had just asked me?”

Eric’s sinuses were aflame from the soda touching the wrong pipe. “Asked you what?”

Ira seemed to have no issue talking through his last bite of hot dog. “You’re trying to figure out if I’m just a local.”

Eric paused.The space of two days had given him a long time to do his research. “Actually,” he replied after a beat, collecting himself. “I know you _were_ a student. I...uh, I looked you up. Your thesis is on the open-access database. I--” He patted his laptop bag. “---I didn’t read it yet; I saw the title and the only words I registered were Western religions and cults. It’s kinda why you didn’t seem real.”

Ira paused in his tracks and twisted around at him, eyebrows raised but a new sort of smile on his face that made Eric feel abruptly like he’d just folded steel in front of him. “So he _is_ a journalist in the making,” he said half-laughing. “Am I wrong to note your use of past tense?”

Eric tossed his drink cup as they crossed a dumpster behind a 7/11. “I mean you k-- we, uh, made out earlier, didn’t we?”

Ira coughed into a breathy laugh, starting to walk again, but slower. “You also just watched me eat two hot dogs in under fifteen minutes so if this is a drug hallucination; it’s a stupid one.”

Eric laughed so hard at that one he almost tripped up.

“I’m a T.A. for Brooke in the History Department,” Ira stated slowly as they sobered. “By the way.”

Eric blinked at him, struck speechless.

“For the record,” he continued. “I’ve been torn since we met about whether the six degrees of separation we have, department-wise, absolves me of what it means that I kissed you today when you…”

“Are you in your thirties or something?” Eric blurted out.

“...when you’re a lot younger than me,” Ira finished flatly before his eyes went wide. “No, I’m twenty-three!”

The air coming up the boulevard separating a bike path and the street they crossed was warm. Eric was a little lost. He’d never really interacted with that many other students here, other than his first week of classes. With Ira, things just kind of stuck, and he liked him a lot. So much so that he was beginning to feel a little glimpse of a panic that was deeper than his earlier worries, deeper enough that his fear that Ira might just disappear one day had a name to it. Ira was a teaching assistant, and _older_ and so much cooler and knew so many damn things Eric didn’t, but _god,_ he was _so. Hot._

…and he was trying to tell Eric something.

“You’re not...are you saying we can’t--” he started weakly. What did he even want from this? Ira had let him wear his jacket; had felt so good when they kissed. His whole body was practically singing around Ira in a way it never had around anyone he’d been with in high school. It felt like a discovery in hindsight, but only exciting because Ira was tangible and Eric now knew what the taste and scent of him felt like wrapped up into one. So maybe it was scary having to unpack all the layers about what it meant that his own sexuality hadn’t opened up this particular avenue before he’d met Ira. “You’re saying we can’t even be friends?”

“You wanna be _friends_?” Ira’s mouth curved in a way that said he had a better idea of what Eric wanted than he did. He looked up and away out at the sidewalk ahead, his brown eyes floating with the orange and pink skyline until they looked caramel from Eric’s vantage. “I’m willing to call you a cab to get you back to school, but I know how this goes; and I know I’m not gonna kiss you again unless you ask for it. However, I’m not lying to myself or you when I say that if you follow me home today, there’s no way this ends with us being _friends_.”

There was a weighty silence as Ira adjusted his bag on his shoulder before shoving his hands in his pockets. He shot Eric a quick glance, one eyebrow raised, before he walked on; longer strides.

Eric didn’t move. It was warm but he was shivering. “I don’t wanna be friends,” he said.

Ira turned on his heel, a shaky silhouette at the top of the hill they stood on where the sun seemed to be kissing the roofs of houses. Eric watched him continue backward, starting to descend the hill as he tossed his head in a universal gesture of beckoning.

And Eric followed.

~*~

Eric had _heard_ things about this part of town, but he wasn’t liable to voice it as Ira strode along the sidewalk a little ways ahead, clearly leading the way as they got closer to his place. It was a two-story mint green building with an emergency staircase jutting out its front, looking almost like a normal apartment duplex except the entrance was along the side of the street just a dip in the alley. Then, oddly enough, a long stone stairwell inside.

“Do you have a roommate?” Eric asked as they ascended.

“Nope,” was Ira’s reply as he took the stairs two at a time with those long legs. Eric followed, pretty much using the banister to haul himself upward in hopeful time with Ira’s easy steps.

The apartment was really small. Smaller than Eric’s dorm. There was a tiny kitchen in its barest regards only lit by an oven light. The main room itself, an open-concept bachelor, seemed to be built around a rug centrepiece, a strangely patterned Estonian art pattern in blue under a squat round table with a stack of papers in a clear sleeve and a well-worn pencil case scattered over it. He had a bordeaux bedspread on a mattress set over a dark wooden palette in the corner; a plant with brown tipped leaves resting on his nightstand sprawling dying vines up his blue walls which were littered with magazine cutouts with the oddest headlines, curled at their edges like they’d been there a while. It was all lit by a single umbrella lamp with chipped, frosted shades and a garland of deeply orange Edison string lights following the window sill and draping just over a set of plain black cotton drapes. Finally, on top of a long stack of textbooks with frayed edges on their binding was a record player with a brown glass case; clearly the price piece of Ira’s decor.

Eric dropped his laptop bag at the door, distracted almost immediately by the next thing that caught his eye. “Is that...an autographed Marilyn Monroe record?” He forgot himself and raced for Ira’s wall bookcase where a vinyl sleeve was propped. _The Poetry of Marilyn Monroe._ “Ohh my _fuck_ , is this for real?!”

Ira was busy emptying out his own bag at the door, bolt cutters, gloves, rope, and flashlight found a scattered home on the floor of a narrow coat closet he’d opened. “You big into bombshells of the nineteen-fifties?” he prompted distractedly.

Eric was a little embarrassed. “No, I just--when I was fourteen, I sat in for my first, uh, auction and…” he trailed off, chilled by the contrast of the quaint, lived-in room he was standing in to the watercolour memory-image of a large hall of marble in Havana, cool drinks and jewels on display.

Ira came in from the hallway, looking distantly askance at his pause. He moved to the kitchen and started opening cupboards. “What auctionable item was fourteen-year old Eric lookin’ to buy?”

Eric chewed his lip and looked back at the record sleeve, a little put-out. Marilyn was very nude on the cover, sprawled backward in comfortable laughter. “My parents brought me along. I just remember a sheet of paper going up for like forty-thousand dollars and the auctioneer saying that before her death she never recorded a single album but she wrote poetry; that the piece of paper was the only physical evidence that she was a writer, but you…”

Ira had emerged from the small kitchen with a brown bottle the size of his thumb and a box that read “Cane sugar cubes”. He sat down on his bed, pulling the tiny table toward him. Eric winced at the thought that this was Ira’s workspace; he was practically curved at the spine when he set his sheaf of papers on his nightstand that Eric could now see was very visibly a blue trunk with peeling vinyl.

“ _I am of both your directions_ ,” he stated in a low declarative tone, as if he were reading while he picked a single sugar cube from the box, examining it from all sides like a jeweler might. “ _Existing more with the cold frost; strong as a cobweb in the wind; hanging downward the most, somehow remaining, those beaded rays have the colors..._ ” He then gestured for Eric to join him, patting the bedspread beside him. “Make yourself at home,” he added in softer, more real tones, before-- “... _the colours_ _I’ve seen in paintings_ … _ah life...they have cheated you_.”

Eric stared down at the sugar cube on the table as he sunk into the bed--which was softer than he expected--while Ira reached out in their silence, unscrewing the tiny brown bottle and withdrawing its rubber eye-dropper cap. He was still quiet for a beat as he allowed the clear fluid inside to drain from the glass dropper, leaving only one miniscule amount shivering at the tip. Eric sat in awe as Ira held the dropper with a steady hand over the cube, letting a single little bead fall with gleaming intent, splashing over the grains of the sugar cube, and bleeding a blue crawling dye over its white crystal.

“ _I am of both your directions,_ ” Ira repeated, leaning down and squinting at the cube for a short protracted moment before he took it between his index finger and thumb, reaching across the stretch between them on the bed, took hold of Eric’s wrist, fingers sliding down until they were clasped about his palm. He dropped the cube square in Eric’s palm. “... _somehow I remain hanging downward the most as both of your directions pull me_.”

Ira’s eyes looked black under his pale orange light. He waited politely as Eric tried to mentally pick up the pieces of his brain that had slid right out when Ira’s soft hands had touched the underside of his wrist. “This is…?” he whispered, feeling a strange sacrosanct reverence. Like he’d somehow caught himself in a church service that was just the two of them, this little sugar cube, and Ira’s poetry.

“ _This,”_ Ira gestured vaguely between himself and the record sleeve with his other hand. “This was _Life_ as written by Marilyn Monroe, and that record contains the only available recording of her very good friend Ella Fitzgerald reading it and other pieces by her. And _that_ ,” He nodded at Eric’s hand as he let go. “That is acid; pure and clean. Acquired with great care by yours truly”

Eric was excited now. “How though? I’m not a narc or anything, but seriously, on both counts, how do you get this stuff?”

Ira smiled, leaning down to screw the cap back on the bottle. “Right place; right time. I like Ms. Monroe a lot. She was a big reader. Loved Dostoyevsky and Milton, and her more contemporary staples like Hemingway and Kerouac. She created, loved, and lived in a way I aspire toward and she would slot right in there; would have brought a whole new dimension to the culture of the Beat Generation if the C.I.A. hadn’t known her mind was dangerously clever. Filled to the brim with secrets and terrible, terrible truths... those fuckers murdered her. She deserved _better._ ”

Eric hadn’t read a word of Dostoyevsky; he was a little concerned that he couldn’t spell it if a gun was to his head. “I read _On The Road_ once? For school,” he mumbled, dropping his gaze, blushing to his ears at the hopeful sound of his own voice.

Ira paused. “You know what Monroe and Kerouac have in common, right?”

He felt dejected. He wished _he_ could slot right in. All he had was his Youtube channel, his obsession with cinematography, and a selective knowledge of marketing. Maybe a few things about film history and variety television. Listening to Ira was like unlocking a door everyone in his life before this had secretly and carefully steered him away from. “I dunno.”

“They subscribed almost _obsessively_ to the adage that _the artist's consciousness is expanded by derangement of the senses._ You’re an artist, Eric. I saw how you took the video we made and crafted it into something that was all your own. The stories I know about this fucking place; they’re--” He gestured with one hand out at the air, as if pushing the weight of his own stories somewhere else. “ _You_ have vision, and a platform you deserve to explore with those crazy beautiful eyes.”

Eric looked up, stunned. No one. Not even his viewers, for all that some of them could be so nice and least of all, not his parents had ever said a single thing so nice about his videos. Ira was looking at him like Eric was the one who’d just spilled Monroe poetry into their silence; as if he had the theories, the truths all waiting in his head to be shared.

Eric was almost absolutely sure he was falling in love.

“You just pop it in your mouth,” Ira coaxed. “I can’t wait to see what _this_ does for your art.”

“You’re not gonna join me?” Eric replied after clearing his throat. Something about falling for a guy made his voice not want to work.

“It’s your first drop of acid. I wouldn’t do that to you. I want you to feel safe. I’m here for you, sober and listening to every epiphany you’re willing to share with me.”

Eric smiled; couldn’t help it; though he knew how soppy it must look. “Thanks for that.”

Ira reached up as if to touch some space between Eric’s hair and ear, but he pulled his hand back, not so smoothly turning the gesture into a stretch as he twisted away to get up. Eric had felt the intent for a brief second and tried really hard to breathe as shallowly as he could because his lungs were suddenly protesting.

“So, music?” Ira announced to the room while Eric quickly tipped the sugar cube into his mouth, licking any residual stickiness on his palm. “I don’t play the Monroe record. You listen to trap music? More the speed you want.”

“Whatever you think’s best.”

“To avoid the come down, though, we’ll just share a joint and crash. Helps you sleep through the more...emotional aspects of the day after….”

The click of the record landing on its turntable was all Eric heard after that as he slid off of Ira’s bed, resting his back against it. He looked around, knowing it was entirely too soon to expect to _see_ anything, but...

“So… uh, how long does it take to kick in?”

“Nine or ten minutes, maybe…”

~*~

“It’s been ten minutes. You good?”

When had Ira crossed the room?

He was just too suddenly in the kitchen and the music was a hearty throb, bleeding out chords in a rhythm that made Eric feel like his heart was slowing right down.

“I’m...I’m okay…”

~*~

Stars. Harsh burning bright lights, the fine delicacy of neon as his mind ploughed through the fuzziness, feeding him with languor and energy all at once. “Oh... _okay_ ,” he sighed, not fully sure but he thought Ira smirked over at him. “ _That’s_ fantastic.”

“You’re not even close to the sweetest part of your trip, just so you know,” Ira said. Eric heard the sound of running water. He heard it in his arms.

 _Fuck_.

“Okay, walk me through this; what’s happening to me?” he whispered, back of his head sinking into the softness of the side of Ira’s bed.

“Couldn’t tell ya, little guy,” Ira called over a running tap. “Everyone’s trip is different. Why not tell me what you see?”

Eric reached up to push his hair back and was momentarily stunned because his fingers felt like they were filled with beads; _long_ beads attached by strings at the knuckle. He opened and closed his fingers, and couldn’t really believe it.

“Well, so far, it seems I’m made of beads.”

Ira laughed, walking over to him. He was holding a glass of water, which he knelt down across from Eric with, long legs folding under him like a pop-up book closing. Eric watched him, rapt, until he realised Ira was pressing the cold glass of water into his hand.

“Drink the whole thing. You might get thirsty later but it’s better not to eat or drink while you’re rolling; the whole foreign substance feeling in the stomach weirds me out during, personally.”

Eric took the glass and was immediately blessedly relieved he had when the water touched his tongue. He drank the whole glass in one go, gulping noisily; only a little embarrassed at the fact.

Ira took the glass and set it on the little table beside them when Eric was done, watching him intently. “Can you...feel the music in the room?” he asked like that was perfectly normal.

Well, it was. It was absurdly normal. He was practically operating in the music. The beat hissing in his ears like a tickle. Eric nodded his head and hated that; he could feel the liquid in his head; every ounce of his own blood in his ears. He elected to keep very still, and observe the texture of Ira’s dying plant leaves.

~*~

He moved his limbs, and it felt like he was splashing against the floor, the texture of his skin was Jello and it felt fragile and unstable as he moved toward Ira who simply sat there, occasionally glancing up from his phone to regard him in observing silence and a laughing grin. Eric laughed, felt the shudder of it in his lungs and laughed even harder.

“What time is it?”

“You just asked me that, little guy. Eight. It’s been an hour since you dropped.”

Eric took a careful breath in; the blue walls were _so_ covered in wet paint. He’d been staring at the long cool droplets chasing each other, trembling like raindrops on a car window. Were they moving?

Who was driving?

The question grew on his tongue, placid and demanding. The feeling of Ira’s lips drawing a cool pressure on his under the acrid air of the mine; his smells. He could hear Ira’s breathing again from those perfect seconds only hours earlier: harsh and hungry in his own mouth. God, that would be...

Eric wet his lips and reached out; he was suddenly distracted by the solid texture of the back of his hand. He had come close to putting a hand on Ira already, but--had it been his imagining only moments before in the feature of this shimmering vision--Ira was trying not to touch him.

“Can I…” he swallowed. “Tell me if I asked you this already….”

Ira watched him patiently. He set his phone down. “What do you want to ask me?”

“I want to hear if your breathing is the same.”

“The same as what?” His voice was so warm and musical. Eric shifted toward him and watched in a heady mixture of dismay and fascination the way Ira, cross-legged, put his hands on his own knees, knuckles going pale.

“The same as when you kissed me.”

“Eric…” Ira began and he almost uncrossed his legs but Eric scooted over to him on his knees, slipping arms around him, hot, alive and solid. The feeling of his ribs, the fever of his chest on Eric’s cheek, burning right through his shirt.

Eric relaxed in with a faint happy sound. “Mmmm,” he said fondly. It felt nice to hug Ira like an old friend; it really felt like a reunion with Ira being so careful with him. “Missed you.” He was pretty sure he said it aloud, longingly into Ira’s ribcage as if they had been separated for a year.

“You’re killing me, little guy…” Ira mumbled from somewhere off above him, fingers starting to pry at him, lift him up. Eric caught his hands, intertwined them. The lack of friction there made Eric’s whole body feel like it was filled with thrusting full and empty-headed want. Just straight skin on skin. Ira sighed against him and Eric got so caught up in the delirium of sensations he’d never experienced, he no longer cared what Ira did so long as he kept touching.

“You’re not doing anything wrong by cuddling,” Eric murmured.

Ira laughed at that. “You very clearly _don’t_ want just a cuddle.”

Eric leaned his head back, smiling sweetly at him. “Give me what I want then.”

Ira’s eyebrows flew up at what he saw on Eric’s face then; his features looked so smooth like someone had taken clay and formed incredible fingerprint grooves. One of the grooves curved; his beautiful beautiful crooked mouth scooped up into a reluctant smile at Eric. “You’re a damn sexy guy, you know that, Eric? But I’m supposed to be your rock tonight, you know? I only want you to feel safe.”

Eric felt the safest he’d ever felt, but he was pretty elated that Ira was giving the assessment a consideration. “Wanna make out with you,” he stated fitfully, sliding upward along Ira’s body until Ira’s belt was tucked against his solar plexus. “You can be my rock and kiss me a little, right?”

Ira huffed a short laugh. “Fuck,” he breathed and Eric was already leaning up at him, wondering if it’d be the same; if it’d be even _better_ now that they were warm and alone in Ira’s little apartment and there was just music and a bed. Whatever the hell that entailed…

Ira, in an abrupt gesture, grasped Eric’s face in his hand, the ‘v’ of his palm holding him at the chin. He paused, staring at Eric’s mouth. “If you’re too far gone, we stop, do you understand?”

Eric nodded wilfully. Decisively. He was getting his way.

“All right,” Ira whispered, letting him go.

It was a bit sloppy because Eric was so focused on making it happen that he did it too hard, and Ira’s lips crushed up against his, slack from surprise, but pliant all the same. Eric breathed in and Ira’s gasp was laced with the earthy, metallic twinge of smoke. Ira’s other hand closed over the side of his ribs and seemed to drag up instinctively, which Eric liked very much; he heard the soft sound come out of him and Ira’s mouth melted into a beautiful, smug shape under Eric’s lips.

They’d just started and Eric already wanted to get closer. Ira was hot all over and Eric could feel it searing through the fibres of his clothing. With the acid licking through his nerve-endings, he was aware of everything at once and was dizzy from it. From Ira’s still, strong grip on his knee and the way he leaned in and opened his mouth as Eric closed his lips over Ira’s upper lip and arched when it was over his lower, he didn’t breathe. Ira shifted closer with a cadent sound like wondering and encouragement all at once. It caused a sudden quick pressure between them to go heavier, hotter and Eric felt a shiver trip up his spine when Ira’s teeth scraped the corner of his mouth and Eric chased it with the dart of his tongue.

Ira pulled him closer until Eric was straddling his thighs, thoroughly distracted by hands sliding up his chest, pads of fingertips rubbing insistent circles over his nipples. Eric clutched against the longer strands of Ira’s hair, exploring the inside of Ira’s mouth meeting his tongue, again and again, closing his lips over Ira’s lower lip when there were these tiny desperate pauses.

Eric let Ira control the kiss, didn’t raise a hand or lean any further forward, eyes shut, seeing the red heat of fever bleeding around his eyelashes when Ira’s tongue licked into his mouth. Ira shifted closer, only breaking their lips apart to breathe a gasp over Eric’s lips. Eric felt a silence between them, the breaking open of that spark-thrill that there was no one in the world but them; that it was something no one else would ever know; now, hugged by four walls of the too small apartment.

Eric felt his own hands hot on his lap, and opened his eyes to look at how the stripes of colour in the room followed Ira’s fingers as they slipped into their favourite place at Eric’s nape. Eric saw a new orange colour take its place around the frayed edges of Ira’s hair curving over Ira’s ears, simple and bright but beating like a heart it grew and attached itself to the spaces between Ira’s palms and Eric breathed deep. Too deep. He was shaking.

“ _Ira_?” he asked aloud and the vibration of his own voice joined the blooming chords of Ira’s record player smoking music into the waves around them.

“You feel amazing, Eric,” Ira told him and his voice sounded like the feathering rush of a thick book being flipped through. “Tell me if I lose you.”

Eric laughed, perplexed by how in love he was with the commandment, with the taste of Ira, burning into a singularity of music in his breath. He was sound; breathless, hungry sound. “I could do this all night,” he said and Ira’s smile split the shadows of the room.

Ira seized the middle of his shirt, other fingers still gripping him by the nape and Eric couldn’t hold off anything anymore. He was forced to lean backward as Ira, so much bigger than him, melted over him on his knees. Eric pressed palms at the small of Ira’s back, scraping an exploring trail up his shoulder blades all through agitated fabric. All the while, Eric kept his lips parted, clutching tighter the more Ira scraped his tongue deeper.

Finally, too soon, Ira pulled away, licking his lips. His eyes were dark strange whirlpools and Eric watched their spiral, waiting as the pupils of them grew like gold striped mouths. Eric realised his eyes were widening and Ira was smiling again, fondly, his fingertips lingered at the back of Eric's neck. He was a little hesitant, other hand shaking as he slipped it underneath the hem of his shirt.

“You still with me?” he whispered.

“All the fucking way,” Eric replied easily, like the notes of the words were aching in his mouth.

His hands fell from the crisp material of Ira's button-down. Ira still looked a little hesitant, a little spooked as he drew Eric's shirt up and over his head. Just as tentatively, his hands fell to Eric’s waist. Eric tried to help as much as he could, raising his hips as Ira pulled his jeans and underwear down.

He was naked. Fundamentally aware of it suddenly, realising only then that the blooming orange smoke was the sharp edges of lamp light, turning to shards in Eric’s blissed out vision.

Ira gently reached for Eric’s hands, guiding them to his own buttons with a wordless instruction. Eric practically tore them apart, caught up in how ephemeral Ira seemed, lips barely parted as he leaned toward Eric. When his lips closed over Eric’s again, Eric smoothed his palms up Ira’s bare chest, fingers gliding over the raised outlines of a tattoo--a vivid bleeding black bird with its wings curved backward. There was something evocative about the texture and the rigid beat of Ira’s heart tapping from the inside of it.

“It’s a raven,” Ira offered, noting Eric’s fingers tracing along its edges. “Prophecy and insight.”

Eric was a little overcome by that; not sure how to say how blistering hot that made him or how bizarre it felt to want to kiss it. He reached up a hand and pressed his thumb to the top of Ira’s throat, tipped his head up so he could kiss down the side of his jawline, reaching the stretch of skin near his collarbones.

“Am I…?” Eric gasped hotly over his skin. “Tell me if I do anything...if I’m--just tell me if I make this weird.”

Ira leaned into it, arching forward on him encouragingly. “You’re doing perfect,” he said.

Ira’s smooth fingers slid up Eric’s arms as Eric kissed down his chest. The tattoo was in so much living colour and Eric mouthed over it, tenderly like it was a fresh injury. Ira let out a faint hiss, hands tightening when Eric’s tongue dipped out, running along the feathers of the bird. It felt as natural as the rest of his skin but Ira’s response was deeply wanton with each arch of his back just as Eric started to tug at Ira’s belt.

He would have managed to completely undress Ira, but Ira reached up and tipped Eric’s face up to his, devouring his mouth all over again. Eric couldn’t help smiling into the kiss, feeling a sizzle-like thrill when Ira’s fingers dove into his hair. As he climbed Eric’s lap, he pulled his head back, straddling up on him a bit higher. He was so good and heavy and it felt like the thrill slipped along his front, and he made a soft noise as it turned into a climatic fire when his hands got in around Ira’s hips. It felt right to control the rock of Ira’s hips and he started to, clenching his fingers tight over him and pulling him hard against him insistently.

“Fuck, fuck...Eric,” Ira gasped and grabbed a handful of Eric’s hair again, but his fingers loosened the moment Eric pulled petulantly at his jeans, letting Ira pull away to kick them off his ankles.

Eric paused, taking all of Ira in visually on his knees in front of him; tan lines, freckles, the white scoop of his bones jutting above his thigh muscles and the rough dust of thick hair over his dick. Ira was hard; a beautiful, startlingly large shape and so very bare against his stomach, and this was so terrifyingly real even as the light kept distracting him; even as the music seemed like it was tickling his pores every time he exhaled.

“It’s all right, you don’t have to--” Ira began, half-laughing and gasping, noting Eric’s hesitation.

“No, I--” Eric gave up on words and just kissed him again. Ira grabbed him by the neck this time. They were both starting to rock, unmindful of the dry ache in it because Eric couldn’t get enough of Ira’s mouth or the fever in his hands when he ran blunt fingernails along the lines of Ira’s ribcage. Nothing felt more delicious than the hungry hurt of having him so naked, sitting in the middle of a room, pushing his dick against Ira’s skin. “Fuck, I _want_ you.”

“Ohhh... yeah?” Ira uttered, looking a little spellbound at the words.

Eric kept losing himself in scintillating mental tangents as he felt suddenly right then like he’d known Ira for years and years. As if he had just seen a view of a younger Ira, like him, nineteen, in the subtle nervous quirk of his lips. He knew him, and wanted him even more.

“Oh yeah,” Eric echoed faintly. His mind was open on a furious and hot kaleidoscope, but the only solid thing in the room was Ira and he was touching him, kissing him and god, kissing felt so good like this. It felt like Ira’s excitement was his; touching him felt like touching himself. “Crap, I want to do everything with you, but I don’t know...I’ve never...”

“Eric…” Ira sighed out a laugh, distracted when Eric got impatient and tugged him forward plaintively, a little roughly to kiss him again, groaning into his lips because soft electricity was shimmering every time their skin touched anywhere and his tongue was humming with aroused static. “ _Eric_ , focus with me for a sec. I’m not going to ask you to do anything if you don’t know what you want,” he said seriously, trying with surprising strength to hold him still. “You’ll have to be specific.”

“Specific,” Eric murmured, licking his lips, hyper-aware of the trail of his tongue and how hot it felt. Aware even more of the open avenue of things he’d considered before but had never known a guy he wanted them from or _for_. “I want you in my mouth--can I suck you off?”

Ira paused and Eric stared at him, distantly aware by some memory of a former self, himself only minutes ago, maybe hours, uncertain and so terrified of Ira judging him. It seemed funny and strange now, even as Ira ducked his head, trying to bite back a laugh, a flushed stripe at the top of his cheeks reaching his ears.

“Well, I mean, of _course_ ,” he said, running a hand in his hair a little rakishly, looking both perplexed and awed.

When Ira sat on the bed, Eric climbed up after him on his knees, bending low into the bedspread. He breathed in as he buried his face along the sharp jut of Ira’s left hip. He let his lips do the touching for him; touch the round, concave slope of the bottom of Ira’s belly before he began to kiss wetly and bite just a little meanly into softer skin, into the lovely plumpness under his navel. Ira jumped and started to breathe in hard through his nose, breaking out in a perfect voiceless groan when Eric teased skin into his mouth. He liked the bites he left until Ira was making sharp abortive sounds in his throat, one long leg splaying out for him.

His eyes met Ira’s from where he’d raised his head and leaned up on one elbow to look at Eric. “You gotta tell me what to do,” Eric said a little helplessly. “I don’t wanna mess this up.”

Ira looked almost ruined with his hair falling in thick brown strands, crowning those glittering eyes. His lips were flushed and parted, breathing little sharp breaths. “You couldn’t possibly…”

Eric smiled and made to open his mouth along the side of Ira’s cock, running his lips in a feathering glance to the hilt. It was so _much dick_. He pulled back. “I don’t know if I can get it all in my mouth?”

“Oh, fuck, no, you...you can just,” Ira laughed, tossing his head back for a moment, exposing his long beautiful throat. Eric got a thrill from the way he looked like he was trying to solve a math equation. He seemed to think for a moment, eyes fixed on the ceiling before they dropped again, hazy brown on Eric, leaving a streak of light the colour of him behind as he moved. “You could…” he swallowed visibly. “Just use your tongue around it…: He reached down and touched along the bottom, and Eric was definitely into that, the sight of Ira’s hand on himself. “That vein, there, just ...use your tongue...lick hard...”

Eric shuddered, his dick was touching the bedsheet and he rubbed at it a little longingly, enjoying the sudden change between them. Ira reached up, one hand slipping hot, sweaty fingers, knitting in Eric’s hair and hanging on, guiding him back down. Eric let himself fall into it; patterns, heat, how his skin tasted--soap, sweat, cotton when he lapped his tongue around the dust of hair leading to a delicate strip of skin around the darkly flushed head of Ira’s cock. He paused, flicking a glance up at Ira, a little startled at the awe in Ira’s stare.

“Don’t open your mouth,” Ira whispered. He was flushed all over. “Like you’re--like you’re kissing it.”

Eric waited only a faint moment, curling his hands over Ira’s hips, squeezing and trying to collect himself—completely aroused just from giving Ira exactly what he wanted—but he bent his head, brushed his lips to the slit, kissing over the cling of pre-come beaded along the top. Ira’s fingers in his hair tightened and his hips twitched, barely winning against himself in the struggle not to push his dick into Eric’s mouth.

The cool air of the room meant nothing on Eric with the blistering heat under his hands, the way Ira’s skin felt under his fingertips. Eric spoke against the head of Ira’s cock, watching Ira’s stomach clench. “I’m gonna try,” he told him. “I want to see how far I can get it in my mouth.”

Ira grit his teeth and Eric saw his other hand, curling against the loose edge of the bedsheet, clench. “Go ahead,” he hissed. “Stop if it’s too much.”

Eric closed his eyes, and played a few fingers over the hilt before cupping the thin skin of Ira’s scrotum; he opened his eyes to watch the strain of muscle going up the gorgeous line of Ira’s thighs as he fought not to push his hips upward. Eric tugged him up gently into his open mouth; he let the head roll over the middle of his tongue before diving in, closing his lips and sucking upward and letting just the hood slip out past his lips. Ira’s fist locked into his hair as his hips rocked only a little, unable to stop as he heaved desperate breaths and stuttering moans. Eric breathed out through his nose slowly, psyching himself up a little before he hollowed his cheeks going down. It was thicker than he thought it’d be, making the edge of his lips stretch. He was alarmed suddenly by his gag reflex practically pushing Ira out of his throat. He rose up a little ways, panting, precome and saliva dripping down his chin.

“It’s okay, it’s okay,” Ira breathed. He made as if to move, and pull Eric up to him, but Eric didn’t budge.

“No, I can do it,” he said, voice coming out hoarse and unfamiliar, but he opened his mouth again, licking the head, using the glide of his own saliva and Ira’s come as he flattened his tongue, lowering himself on it slowly. If he didn’t do it too fast, he could figure out when to breathe.

“Yeah, that,” Ira gasped, his voice raked to its thinnest threads, high and breathless. “Keep doing that. Relax your throat--oh _fuck_.”

Eric let the head of Ira’s cock lick along the soft line of his palate and further in. He felt immediately greedy for Ira's new broken tone when he groaned again. He could _easily_ keep doing just this, and he started an enthusiastic rhythm, marveling that Ira was letting him control this, even though his mouth was already a mess and the wet sound as he drew upwards again and again, slick and sticky on his tongue. Eric was in euphoria, the orange wave of light constantly on the echo of his eyeline was swimming and the way Ira was pulling on his hair felt deeply connected to the burn in his chest, caustic and lovely.

Ira was wound so tight, trying not to move for more the quicker Eric went. He took a moment’s reprieve, coming off Ira’s cock to wipe his mouth with the back of his hand before he opened his mouth on him again, easier this time. Ira’s back curved off the bed, and Eric smoothed his sweaty fingers along the side of Ira’s hips and grabbed his long thighs. He barely got his fingers around them as he brought him up in his mouth. He let Ira strike the back of his throat, swallowing in an off-choke that was more than half as desperate as Ira was with his half-crazed, whisper-mantra of ‘“ _oh god, oh god, oh god_ ” until Eric started to taste a faint stripe of salt over the back of his tongue.

Eric gasped for air, sucking it in around the shape of Ira in his mouth and that just had Ira go taut with paralysis, fingers curling and one knee bending a weight on Eric’s shoulder. Eric felt his eyes water, tears sticking to his eyelashes when Ira grabbed for him with his other hand and rocked helplessly. His body curved in one sinuous upward wind and his mouth pulled at its edges with the rough and fraught sound ripped out of him when hot, stringy heat struck Eric’s throat.

At some point, Ira’s thumb and index finger was playing along the edges of his mouth, the stinging remnants of the stretch were there but Eric leaned into it. The high had changed. He felt like he was floating out the top of his scalp and Ira’s smile looked like the crisp edges of a river. Had he lost time? He was so hot, his body was in a fever. He closed his lips on Ira’s thumb, sucking. He was delirious.

“You gotta be hitting the peak of your high, Eric. How’re you feeling?” Ira asked him breathlessly, having sat up He leaned forward, replacing his fingers with his lips.

“Want you,” Eric moaned into his mouth. He was practically sobbing.

He was so damn hard, felt like he was being worked over, made raw and slick as Ira mouthed down his throat, humming soft words. He pinned Eric back against the bed. Eric waited in heavy breathing waves as Ira slid down off the bed, had to be kneeling on the floor, tucked between Eric’s legs. He might have arched when Ira touched the tops of his thighs; he wasn’t sure. He already had a hand on the back of Ira’s neck when his palm closed on his cock again.

“It’s your turn,” Ira said in a low tone. “Just lie back and feel your trip.”

Ira licked his lips wet, pert and swollen as they’d become and ran a thumb down the line of it, coaxing the head around his foreskin. Eric’s hands dropped to the bed; he felt so, so exposed and Ira was looking at him with his eyes full blown with want.

“I keep thinking we’re still on the roof of the watchtower...” Eric informed him, panic and arousal shaped together as Ira’s mouth leaned so close and Eric could hear his breath grow ever more ragged. He was ruined; Ira really wanted him; his voice was so plaintive when he continued. “Like we’re gonna leap off together…”

“Uh huh, tell me more,” Ira said and with a quick lap of his tongue, he touched at the droplet of precome drooling down the head of Eric’s cock making Eric clench his fingers into the sheets with an earthy creak. Or that was the clock? Somewhere in the room. “I like my name on your lips; you wanna say it for me?”

Eric’s mouth went dry. “Ira.” He looked at Ira; he was dark-eyed, glowing an array of colour in tinted lights. The room was spreading open, soft and comforting. Eric was reeling with want. “Please…” he gasped in high tones, and why did he suddenly feel twice as excited with Ira’s smile spreading right on base of his cock?

No reply. Just the scoop of his hands under Eric’s knees, pulling his legs up over his biceps so that Eric slid down to the edge of the bed just as Ira opened his mouth to take him in, letting Eric slide past his lips in one motion. Eric moaned and scrambled, legs dangling over Ira’s upper arms as his fingers kneaded at his hips, digging fingertips in until Eric was rocking, hands braced behind him and pathetic, tight, little sounds coming from his chest with every new way Ira seemed to know how to suck.

Dazed and hungry for more, Eric watched Ira’s lips, pink and full pop the head of his dick in like it was a lollipop; he squirmed when he felt the wet friction of Ira’s tongue flicking at him, pressing on the slit hard like he was trying to get everything.

Disbelief, arousal and a mess of things were killing Eric in a vast overload. He never expected Ira would even want him, and Eric definitely knew just exactly what _he_ wanted and…

He screwed his eyes shut, an epiphany hitting him like the cast of sunshine, like the dawn had perceived him first. “I don’t want to study business, Ira,” he mumbled.

Ira paused and looked at him fondly, and exasperation for Eric was nothing new but it was so many times worse because it felt like his entire body spilled with a new kind of flush; the sort that Eric used to think was silly; being looked at so inanely and feeling pleased at the same time.

“Then don’t,” Ira said, but then his mouth was a hot lovely swallow and--oh--the way he practically inhaled him in, taking him so far deep that Eric felt the constricting pressure rock him to the very hilt. It was already torture but Ira held him roughly still, starting to bob up and down, jaw going taut as his perfect lips roved right to the base. Eric rocked in, breathing faster and faster as Ira grasped him tight and sucked harder than Eric had ever had it.

The muscles of his arms were on fire with ache as Ira grabbed two handfuls of his ass, kneading and slathering him with his tongue whenever he pulled out, making the most obscene noise as he took him back in again. Eric heard himself whisper and gasp as the tip of his cock struck the back of Ira’s throat and Ira seemed not to mind, throat flexing like he meant to take him in entirely. Eric wanted it all, and it was so much more maddening when he looked at Ira and those dark eyes were fixed on him, glimmering and wicked.

“I’m gonna drop out,” he told him. Somehow the words felt desperate and dire in the moment; bursting out of him in a gasp.

“You can do what you want,” Ira replied, panting hot on his dick, out of breath. “Your potential is nothing short of genius, Eric.”

“Yeah, I’m... _really_ smart right now,” he said distractedly, humour and warmth shimmering around him when Ira coughed a surprised laugh before grabbing a shameless tight handful of him before letting the head of Eric’s cock follow the middle of his tongue, slurping him in.

Eric nearly sobbed when Ira sped up, his body rigid. His eyes fell shut, warmth riddling him up from his middle, rocking him against his will. He was close and he moaned helplessly, legs dangling from over Ira’s arms but kicking fruitlessly. He choked on his moan, dizziness from having his arms braced behind him seeping in at the same time as a roar of pleasure collided with his desperation.

Every thought, every epiphany and neuroses swimming in Eric’s head after that exchange blew out of his head as Ira really started to pull him in; he bent his head low, arched flexibly and took Eric in as far as the back of his throat until his nose touched deep in the curls of his pubic hair; until Eric clutched the back of Ira’s head and grit his teeth, trying not to spill out the broken sobs climbing up his tongue.

Ira spread his legs with his shoulders--invaded him--with palms coming up his hips and digging in greedily like he was going to devour him whole. Eric cried out, felt it quiver out of his lungs and clapped a quick hand over his mouth, worried he was practically yelling. Ira hummed a satisfied, smug sound shooting a vibration up Eric’s cock like a swollen burn jittering new bullets of deliciousness through him. Eric keened a bit, trying to rock up but Ira had him entwined, legs now over his shoulders and Ira opened his eyes, and just _looked_ at him, mouth open around him, sliding Eric up and down his flat exposed tongue.

It was everything. Eric stared at him, writhing a little, pushing Ira down on his cock, blazing up until he saw stars again and Ira’s eyes were glazed with lust, getting off again on the sight of him. That was…

Eric already felt like he was about to spill out of himself somehow when he came. He tried to warn Ira, tried to make a conceivable word but Ira just rolled him even more on his tongue, mouth open, as strings of Eric’s come hit in spurts, splashing his lips, tongue. Ira let out a voiceless sound like a wrecked groan, anticipating it, desperate, licking at the mess on his lips as Eric, panting, raked fingers in his own hair, thoroughly overtaken and blistering with his orgasm.

Ira got off his knees, gently letting Eric’s legs go. Eric laid spread-eagle on the bed, laughing exhaustedly. “I can’t believe I’m gonna drop out of Berkeley… and I can’t believe how good you are at that.“

Ira smiled, getting to his feet to stand over him, reaching for a box of tissues, whipping out a few sheets to wipe his mouth and chin and Eric gasped at the horizon burning behind Ira and the swell of music that came with it. It felt like he was in an old MGM film, burnt into a reel of images flickering across Ira’s screen..

“What if _you’re_ the nineteen-fifties bombshell…?” he whispered in awed tones.

Eric hadn’t seen Ira laugh that hard since they’d met, and he knew he was _really_ fucked, because he wanted to spend forever getting him to do that again.

~*~

He just simply didn’t go back to his dorm.

It was never actually discussed between them how long he could or would stay, but the following day together, Eric recovered from the acid by lying in Ira’s bed on his back with his legs on Ira’s lap, talking between spoonfuls of a Big Gulp 7/11 slurpee Ira fed him. Ira treated him so gingerly and was still a little careful about waiting for Eric to initiate their touches, but they still spent the following two days sober just talking and listening to Ira’s records.

It wasn’t until Monday that Ira--in the middle of listening to Eric describe the plot to an old Alfonso Cuarón film--simply blurted out at him in one breath. “I have a two-hour lecture this afternoon; you don’t have to go anywhere if you don’t want, but If you’re still here when I get back, we could hang out some more after?”

“I’ll totally stay here,” he replied way too quickly, but Ira’s grin said everything like a soother on every one of his anxieties.

“ _Good_ ,” Ira had said.

Eric just really didn’t want whatever this was to end, and somehow didn’t feel the compunction or any pressure to leave. Instead he threw himself creatively into his Youtube channel, editing furiously whenever Ira was away, making a little workspace for himself on Ira’s bed, happy to sit around in his boxer-briefs, computer on his lap, eating leftovers of the breakfast Ira had made until the video was posted by the time Ira walked back in the door Wednesday evening.

It was the evenings, really, that quickly became Eric’s favourite. Ira would finish grading papers by the time Eric was ready to order some takeout, cluttering Ira’s place with bags and containers from whichever place Ira recommended and then they’d sit on his floor, watching episodes of _Mr. Robot_ and talking through the whole thing.

Their new video did crazy good. Some other students were in the comments, alarmed and excited because they hadn’t even known about Lawson Adit or the story behind the mine, which pushed them to link it to their friends and the views started _really_ climbing. His regular viewers were as charmed by Ira as he was and he was a little shy and panicky at the comments asking if Ira had a girlfriend. Instead of answering those comments, he arranged a livestream on YouNow and Ira fielded questions in real time.

No one in the chat, much to Eric’s dismay, so much as dropped a word of curiosity about Ira’s relationship status. However, having at least a couple hundred people show up live in their chats was bigger than he expected and people were deeply engaged in their content. Emphasis on “their”.

Eric _knew_ it was asking a lot, but he was thinking of popping the question: _would you, Ira, please please please let me, Eric, add your name permanently to the channel name_? It was just that they didn’t even have a name for this strange, new, intense holiday. Eric had pretty much moved himself in with a guy he’d met like a week ago and he knew how it was going to look if he tried to put any kind of _forever_ on it.

He got his answer without even posing the question when he finished another new video the following Sunday. Eric had spent the hours, while Ira was away teaching, for research. After two days of the same, Eric set up his tripod and camera and sat Ira down in front of his bookshelf. Ira smoked a joint and Eric began to tell Ira in his best imitation of Ira’s storyteller voice about the rise of cult activity on Berkeley’s campus.

He had edited in a fun series of interviews with other students who expressed not wanting to walk alone at night simply because there were always other students waiting on corners and sometimes in the underground tunnels that connected the libraries with pamphlets for a “Bible study”. Lonelier, more curious students he’d emailed told him anonymously that they had reached out to the “priest” on the pamphlet, and found themselves trapped in an extortive cycle of paying to receive help with their grades, access to secret study notes, and long descriptive prayers they were required to recite on webcam. Ira was so fascinated and laughed at all of Eric’s weak Jonestown jokes, adding in small jewels of his own about cultist psychology and what it meant to be a struggling student on a budget so broke that you might scam a crowd of other, richer students.

“Whoever this cult leader is, I’d like to meet him,” Ira told the camera. “Subscribe to our channel and schedule an interview.”

Eric was already beaming when Ira glanced at him in a moment’s realisation once the words were spoken. The word “our” sat between them and Eric would have to spend an extra few minutes later editing out the eight or so minutes of footage of him on Ira’s lap, kissing his elation and relief into Ira’s mouth.

He felt a weird kind of reluctance after he’d clipped it all out and dragged it to his computer’s recycle bin. Maybe it was the taboo nature of watching the way Ira’s palms slipped down around his hips and over his ass, squeezing in gorgeous hi-definition so Eric could see every vein in his arms contract that made him hesitate, but the thought of watching the whole moment back over and over like he wanted to made him feel like a voyeur, which was actually crazy.

In a last minute move, he dragged the clip out of his recycle bin, tucking it in a folder with a strange little thrill. Instead of thinking too much about it, he changed the channel’s name from just Eric to the cooler looking: Ira & Eric.

God, he might as well have put a heart in there as if he were scratching their names into the internet like it was a big oak tree.

Either way the video and his announcement of the name change on Twitter gained them over a thousand subscribers in one day.

They celebrated. Some time in the middle of that following week, Eric gave Ira some money for more weed, and they went into the city, bought a fifth of vodka. Ira rolled them a joint, and they sat on Indian Rock staring out at San Francisco in the distance cupped in the hands of the bay area.

 _“I had a dime who never smoked blunts just bowls taught me how to blow o's, inhale through my nose so if you see me smoking,blow my high_ ,” Ira said in a rhythmic rush under his breath, bobbing his head..

Eric laughed, startled. “Was that Whiz Khalifa?”

Ira nodded, smiling with his tongue on the edge of the rolling paper, sweeping it along as he chuckled and folded it. “My other favourite poetry,” he offered philosophically. “You ever French inhale?”

“If it’s what they’re doing in the music video? I think so,” Eric murmured, distracted by the new Zippo he’d bought for them unhinging a comically large flame.

Ira held out the lit joint. “Go for it.”

When Eric accepted it and put it in his mouth, Ira leaned over his shoulder, chest to Eric’s back, and Eric could feel his heartbeat, right through his ribs like it was more vibrant than his own. Ira sighed when Eric inhaled, a content little sound, arms coming around Eric’s waist.

“Did you ever make home movies like I did?” Eric asked him, trying a little fruitlessly to get the smoke billowing out of his mouth to slip over his upper lip. Gravity defied him. “Fuck, I can’t do it.”

“I remember there being a camcorder in the house,” Ira reported simply. “You gotta do it before you inhale; while the smoke is fresh.”

Eric barely turned what with Ira hovering right over his shoulder, one hand spread over his ribs and one hand lying gently on his thigh. He was trying to focus. He took a healthier drag this time, but inhaled without thinking. He cursed a little before continuing, “You just seem really good with a camera. Did you take a photography class?”

“Student loans are already gutting me.” When Ira spoke, his chin pressed to Eric’s shoulder like he was resting all of his weight on it, talking lazily before Eric reached up and put the joint to his lips. His nose grazed Eric’s knuckles as he took a drag. “Can’t waste all that debilitating debt on a photography course. Keep trying.”

“ _I put some fire on it, and now they’re beggin' me to put it out_ ,” Eric quoted up at him before he sucked sharply on the joint; he parted his lips and the smoke snaked upward as he breathed in through his nose. “--I fucking did it!”

Ira shook them both with his laugh which set Eric off. It was a perfect moment. A half-shine of his favourite memory forming in the feeling of Ira’s arm around him as he laughed until his ribs ached.

Ira started to tell him about Chicago and his mom raising him alone after his dad had vanished when he was nine. He told Eric about his moving to Berkeley alone after high school and his peers and friends that had come and gone, how he’d stayed because travelling was expensive and _student loans_.

Eric didn’t want to talk about his parents; he already knew how he’d sound. Ira was so damn supportive about his decision to drop out, that he just didn’t want to tell him that his dad had paid for everything and that once he turned twenty-one, he’d have access to a trust fund. Eric would never have loans of any kind to worry about while Ira seemed to have shouldered them since before his graduation.

Instead of speaking on it, Eric just resolved to keep paying for more stuff as he asked Ira more questions about Chicago. They talked for hours about the TV shows they grew up with, and Eric found new fondness for Ira in the ways they paralleled.

They took more walks at night after that, trailing a nice, dry, and heady scent of weed behind them, and they’d either make a run for it when a patrol car cruised by or in the shelter of a space between streetlights in a residential area, Eric would tug him by the jacket into his mouth, kissing him deeply and lazily until Ira breathed heavy hot liquor and THC back on his lips, saying, “Let’s go home.”

They’d crash like comfortable sardines on Ira’s bed, hands down each other’s pants, rocking themselves into a mess under a crazy melange of molly, sometimes PCP, and a lot of weed.

In the stretch of a week and a half, their channel hit five thousand subscribers.

Now Eric _really_ wanted to celebrate. He dragged Ira into a cab uptown with him where he checked reviews and decided he wanted to go to a nice restaurant near the Berkeley marina because Ira had said at some point he’d never tried _wagyu_.

At first, Eric was concerned Ira, very open about being on a teaching assistant payroll with a student loan’s budget, might get a little cagey about going somewhere expensive and letting Eric pay, but Ira seemed stoked about Eric’s suggestion when Eric delicately told him, “I just wanna buy us a nice dinner.”

“You’re taking me out on the town?” he’d said. “Trying to show me off to the bourgeoisie, huh?”

Eric laughed at that. It made him imagine the notion of introducing Ira to the people of their age group at the country clubs in Glendale; the thought filled him with a strange palpable thrill. The same sort of feeling he might have gotten walking into the lobby on Chevy Chase Drive and lighting up a cigarette.

They shared half a joint in the parking lot, which loosened Eric right up, but it also made him want to clear everything with Ira. Eric hated that money was an uncomfortable subject. “I just want us to be on the same page, like, I don’t _mind_ spending for both of us,” he rambled tentatively, inadvertently watching Ira’s expression, smiling but still unreadable as he tucked their little roach in a tin case.

Ira made something of a show, stopping at the door to the restaurant, waiting for Eric to open it for him. “Nah, I’m getting to like how you like to spoil me,” he said saucily, winking at Eric as he passed him, hands in his pockets, looking such a picture in a frayed charcoal grey long-sleeve and a pair of rose gold hipster shades perched on his long nose.

Maybe it was the view; the long blanket of ocean under the balcony where their table overlooked, through floor to ceiling windows, the turgid high tide. Or it could have been the way Ira himself looked, blitzed out, eyes glassy behind his rose shades and already halfway through his tomato confit. Maybe there was just _something_ about the backward way Ira put his spoon in his mouth and looked distractedly out at the window that made Eric say it.

“Would _you_ say we’re dating?”

The grey sky behind Ira was striped with swirling clouds and pillars of mist spilled into the waves, a roiling storm too far to touch the marina. A waitress came around and refilled Ira’s wine.

Ira smiled around a mouthful of shrimp. “If we weren’t, I’d say this is sending me some mixed signals” he said finally. “Because I really fucking like you.” There was a bit of potato on the corner of his lower lip.

Eric reached out, across the stretch of tablecloth and food between them, brushing the potato off Ira’s lip. Ira paused, watching him, a light in his irises especially for Eric. His heart shuddered up into a desperate race and he flushed.

Eric _loved_ him.

 _Crap_ , he thought vehemently, reaching quickly for Ira’s glass of wine, taking a sip before any of the staff might see and come card him.

“Hot damn, you were right about _wagyu,_ ” Ira remarked into their blushing silence, now focused on his plate, a smirk forming as another waiter passing their table drew close enough to overhear his next statement. “Guess I’d better put out, huh?”

Eric spat red wine all over his side of the table and Ira nearly tipped over his plate reaching out to push his napkin at him. The both of them got caught in a quick spiral of suppressed giggles so hard that Eric almost cried. He was giddy and cycling through the same beats of longing when he looked at Ira in front of him. He’d never felt more real.

Maybe drugs had a way of doing that.

> _**October** _
> 
> _**2015** _

One thing Eric was convinced drugs had a way of doing, it was making a few weeks feel like one long weekend. He didn’t exactly realise it was a Friday or that he had been with Ira for nearly a month until he woke up to his phone ringing somewhere in the apartment. He’d barely looked at it at all so he wasn’t surprised to find it under a pile of clothes. Ten missed calls from his dad!

And another five from his mom...

“ _Fuck_ ,” he exclaimed, and Ira rolled over in the sheets, making a rough sound and emerging with his hair a brilliant halo around his head.

“Whassat?” Ira mumbled.

Eric was already texting. _**Sorry. Was Sleeping. Have late classes today. What’s up?**_

Eric felt like he was suddenly meant to run for the door and bolt it, block out the rest of the world; his _dad’s_ world from seeping into the picture and clouding out the vision Ira made sitting upright in the bed. The sunlight cast through the threads of the moth-eaten curtains up his naked chest and stomach, kissing each sleep-warm part of his skin with bronze. Eric wanted to switch off his phone, deal with it all later because right then he wanted to crawl back in there, bury his face in Ira’s skin, kiss every spot the sunshine was warming him.

“It’s just my--” he started to say, already resolving to maybe do just that, before his phone pinged again.

_**Your mother and I are on campus.** _

This time Eric really did yell. “ _Motherfuck_!” He ran for his clothes, whichever ones he could find. His shirt was missing; he’d probably spilled something on it days ago. “I have to go.” He could hear his own voice, tense and he knew he had questions to answer but this was not something Ira was going to understand. In the wild and certain scope of his intention to drop school and focus on Youtube, he had firmly refused to think on the part of the process that would be telling his parents.

Ira looked more awake now; his eyes following Eric around the room as he gathered his things. He wriggled into his own jeans and grabbed one of Ira’s button-ups. “Can I wear this?”

Ira nodded mid-yawn, swinging his legs off the bed to head for the bathroom, stretching and at ease putting his whole naked self in Eric’s line of vision. Eric was distracted, but he was in big enough panic to get his Macbook packed. He had to get inside his dorm or meet his dad somewhere that’d look like he was coming down from his building.

He got to the door, his laptop bag slung clumsily over Ira’s shirt which was clearly too big for him. “Hey, uh…”

Ira peered around the door, toothbrush in his mouth, looking quizzical.

“I’ll be back right after, um...after.”

Ira’s eyes squinted in a pseudo-affable expression. “Miss you already,” he said so easily and breezily.

Eric had to practically throw himself out the door to keep from saying something soppy and silly like, “ _Come with me; meet my parents_.”

God, _imagine._

He nearly dropped his bag twice trying to race for the closest bus stop, but he got in line behind a few commuters as he pulled his phone out at a series of pings.

_**Where are you?** _

From both his parents.

_**Just getting dressed! I’ll be down in a bit!** _

When the bus stopped at Sather Gate, he practically sprinted for Bear transit, fumbling for his student ID out of his bag. He knew he was pushing it. It had been a little over twenty minutes since he’d first responded to their call. He was just going to have to wing it all the same especially if they were standing right outside his building.

He was sweating by the time the shuttle came around to Bowles Hall, but he ducked down, scanning the entrance for any sight of his parents as the bus slowed to a halt. Clear so far. He hopped off and took three sharp breaths before tearing up the stone steps toward the archways, watching for anyone passing, absolutely terrified he was about to see his dad’s haircut floating around in the throng of students heading in and out.

The entryway was empty and there were about four students in the lounge area. He pushed his hair out of his face and made for the stairs. He would need to change clothes when he got up there; now that he was out in the open air, he could smell nothing but Ira all over the place. Whether that was his natural scent or something he’d drowned nicely in the past week, Eric felt conspicuous bringing it with him. A thing he wanted to keep for just him, and not his dad.

His mom was the first to spot him, her eyes going wide at the sight of him from under her teal sun hat before she shot a stricken, panicked look at Eric’s dad. Eric stopped in his tracks at the top of the steps, gauging whether or not to run for it.

But then his dad looked at him.

They were waiting in front of his dorm room door. His dad’s squarish features twisted at the sight of Eric, seemed to take in all of him in a swift gaze through reflective thin glasses. Eric allowed the tight panicked air in his lungs to rush out in a helpless exhale.

“What are you doing here?” His voice was hollow in his own ears.

“Your roommate told us,” his mom said, breaking the silence with a weary tone. “That you packed up camera equipment and nothing else, and haven’t come back for over three weeks.”

Eric stared. “You had him spying on me?!”

His dad slipped his cuff up to check his watch, a deep furrow in his brow; a practiced gesture to avoid having to look at Eric anymore. “You’re asking like it wasn’t a good idea,” he scoffed tersely. “Doesn’t matter apparently, because you document your whereabouts quite avidly using the internet. And your expenses are the most telling. Which ATMs and _liquor_ stores--”

“Orlan, not here!” his mom hissed, sounding exasperated. “Eric, let’s go to lunch...”

Eric was probably going to put on his favourite Tims and kick his roommate in the dick next time he saw him.

~*~

When Eric was younger, he used to get excited when his dad hired out the entire tea room of a hotel restaurant, because it meant a special occasion. Right now, however, Eric sat on his side of the damask-covered circular table at the Palace Hotel Garden Court tea room staring intently at his menu, feeling wilted and anxious.

Felt weird to be sober too.

“I would have liked for us to have a little day trip like this,” his mom said wistfully and Eric raised his menu to avoid looking at her.

It had been a very chilly car ride, and an even chillier ferry trip.

“Perhaps on a happier appointment; I can arrange for another personal day,” was his dad’s curt reply.

At least they weren’t yelling. If they were in a good mood otherwise, by the meal, he could broach the subject. He had to make a clean break and they weren’t going to start getting used to the idea until they knew what he wanted.

“So what’re you ordering, Mom?” he asked airily.

His mom’s heavily made-up eyes squinted at him suspiciously. “ _À la carte_ , Eric?”

“Ah yeah, I was just--” He quickly shoved the menu he’d grabbed back into the silver tea cart’s sleeve. He didn’t understand why she had to make the idea of ordering on a menu sound like he’d told her he hadn’t bathed in a month.

“And is that really the style?” she proceeded, having found her opening. As she reached alongside the table to tug at his collar, very obviously spying the tag indicating it was a cheap brand. “I thought oversized was at least two decades ago. ”

“It’s not--” he mumbled, shifting just enough out of reach. “It fits fine.”

Eric glanced at his dad, feeling his acerbic reading stare fixed on him. His mom made a disapproving sound into her mimosa.

There was a weighty silence as the waitstaff entered the private room, laying out the first-course crab salad. He kept itching to reach for his phone and see if Ira texted him. It felt a little intrusive to think of the way his dad’s hard black eyes kept casting over him with a long diatribe waiting in the juxtaposition of Ira saying things the way he said them; the way Eric liked most.

“I don’t like this for us,” Eric’s mom said at last as the waitstaff left them, except the one waitress on standby at the doors, holding the lemon water pitcher. “You can see he knows he made a mistake and it won’t happen _again_.”

Eric shut his eyes. It was gonna be _worse_ than yelling or a lecture. They wanted immediate surrender.

“Eric?” his mom pressed and he opened his eyes again, a little jarred at the fact that the bright domed skylight above them made the entire table seem like it was glistening. “Tell your dad you understand your mistake, then we can all move on and enjoy this lovely Friday.”

Eric picked up his glass of lemon water and drank a quick mouthful. His dad had stopped eating, laid down his fork, waiting with chin raised and glare in place. It should be so easy, yeah. He could just _tell_ them everything was all right, then he could go back to Ira.

For some reason, it was as he opened his mouth to reply in the affirmative that he thought of it. The mine. Ira’s sad, wry smile. The story of thousands of human remains buried under clay, all of them ferried away into some secret collection. He thought of Marilyn Monroe’s unrealized art and poetry. She’d died with all her secrets and Ira lived so beautifully like he knew that could happen to him. Eric felt sick.

“It was a mistake,” he stated, sitting up in his chair. “Yeah, it was my mistake to--”

“There, see?” his mom exclaimed, in way too hearty a tone.

“I’m not done,” Eric snapped and quaked a little in the shadow of his dad’s countenance getting darker. “I’m saying it was my mistake to agree to business school. I don’t wanna do it anymore. I never wanted--”

“I set aside close to fifty-thousand dollars to make sure you could enter this world with confidence, and that is only to cover your first year!” Eric’s dad bellowed, one flat palm hitting the peacock blue table cloth. “And suddenly you’re too smart for university!”

“Orlan!” Eric’s mom interjected sharply, evenly.

“It was not my idea to come to a restaurant, Annette, and you expect for us to spend all day pretending he doesn’t smell like the inside of a crackhouse!?”

“We _agreed_ we wouldn’t yell.”

Eric thought that was a little much. He hadn’t even _tried_ crack. He leaned forward, speaking calmly and determinedly. “I just need you guys to understand where I’m coming from--”

“All right, help _me_ understand then!” His dad interjected fiercely. “My accountant reported three different withdrawals-- _two thousand dollars in total--_ in an ATM near _Oakland_. I thought your card might have been stolen, but then I received an email!” He gestured at Eric’s mom with a sharp beckoning gesture. “Who were you staying with on that side of the city all these weeks?”

Eric hesitated as his mom dug around in her large purse and unearthed an iPad. “I was with a friend,” he said finally in muted tones.

“Oh, _Eric_ ,” his mom murmured, exasperation in every syllable, but Eric was watching his dad.

“I’m guessing the friend is _this_ person?” his dad had unlocked the iPad and laid it face up on the table between them. Eric didn’t breathe as he leaned over to look; he didn’t even have to look, really, because he _knew_.

It was a screenshot. And as Eric’s dad reached out, finger swiping over the screen to show frame after frame after frame, Eric saw it was several screenshots of his own videos; _their_ videos. Ira sitting on that bench, leg folded one over the other; another with bolt cutters in hand; Ira mid-sentence, hand in his hair, smiling; close up of Ira next to him gesticulating; Ira with a blunt on his lip, smiling shyly down at him. Eric’s heart stuttered sharply, painfully.

“So what part do you need for us to understand?” his dad barked. “That you willingly trespassed and defaced school property? That you and this character were seen with drugs on campus?! That you _filmed it and put it on the internet for everyone to see?!”_

Eric sat back in his seat, deflated. “It was just--we didn’t _take_ anything. It was just the door that was damaged. I’ll replace it, if...if it’s that big a deal...”

Eric’s mom gestured with her glass at the waitress for water, looking increasingly more distressed the longer Eric’s dad was silent, staring at Eric with an apoplectic gaze.

“You don’t have me fooled, Eric,” his dad said at last in a low dangerous tone, each succinct syllable like a hiss. “You _know_ your actions are wrong and for all that I am _furious_ with you. I know what this is; you’ve made a new friend and he and his drug habit are enticed by how much access you have to the money he needs--”

“It is _not_ like that!” Eric snapped. Now _he_ was mad. They hadn’t even _met_ Ira, and what the hell was wrong with _needing_ money? “Just because someone doesn’t have as much doesn’t mean--”

“You think I didn’t ask about your friend when these photos showed up?!” His dad was matching him in tone, face red as he pulled the iPad towards himself, opening another tab, reading aloud furiously. “Ira Lewandowski. Hundreds of thousands of dollars in debt, and a glorified tutor in a near defunct department of religious studies. He’s almost been suspended twice on suspicion of dealing hallucinogenic substances on school property! My sources are convinced he trades his landlord free drugs for a discount on his rent, if he pays any at all!”

Eric’s mum had finished her second glass of water and was looking embarrassed and miserable. “A _drug dealer_ ,” she exclaimed, reaching out toward Eric’s arm and grasping her husband’s hand in the other. “Can’t you see we’re so _worried_ for you, Eric?”

Eric felt so sick and furious. He stood up, throwing his napkin down. “You’re _not_. You’re worried about money and how this looks. Yeah, I shouldn’t have put us breaking into the mine on Youtube, but don’t start attacking him because he has less than us!”

“I am not _attacking_ him because he has less. I am trying to make you aware that not everyone who wants to be your friend has good intentions!” his dad spat, switching off the IPad, handing it to Eric’s mom. “Do you really think he would have let you stay for so long if he weren’t getting something out of it?”

That stung. It really stung. Because Eric was thinking about it and he didn’t want to. It was never like that. Yeah, he was paying for their drugs because he _wanted_ to; Ira had never asked. He’d paid for food and equipment and drinks. He _wanted_ Ira to have it all, but it couldn’t mean that Ira looked at him and didn’t feel the way Eric did. He had had to _beg_ Ira to kiss him their first night together, so it wasn’t like he was…

He thought of Ira sitting with him in the park, resting his chin on Eric’s head, talking about his mom, talking about where he’d come from without any hint of shame.

Eric looked up at the ceiling of the restaurant, feeling his eyes start to sting as his throat laboured through his next swallow. “You don’t even get how people work, Dad,” he stated as his eyes started to grow hot and his voice shook on the last word.

“How _dare_ you,” his dad snapped. “I’ve built an empire on knowing how people work, Eric; and I know that an addict is bad for business, and you’ll know that too when you finish your degree!”

“I’m _not_ going back to school!” He was fully crying now, tears spilling down his cheeks.

“Eric, sit _down,_ ” his mom pleaded, her own eyes glassy with tears.

His dad threw his hands up. “I don’t understand how he can be so clueless!”

“No, no, he understands. Eric, tell him you understand! There’s really no need to be--just say you’ll go back to school. You’re just embarrassed, I know, but your father already paid the dean a generous donation so you won’t be expelled.”

Eric froze. “What? What are you talking about?”

His father sat back, throwing his napkin on his plate, looking exasperatedly at his wife before addressing Eric in calmer tones. “You’re foolish to think the dean and faculty of the school hasn’t been notified of your videos about them, about the break-in. You are fortunate he was willing to hold a meeting with me. However, I reassured him you would delete those videos and post an apology to the school for the defamation on both counts _and only then_ will you be allowed to attend and qualify for Haas.”

“You shouldn’t have done that,” Eric breathed, horrified. “I didn’t ask--”

“As for this _Ira_ ,” his dad continued, ignoring him. “His contract with the department will be cancelled and he will be dismissed tomorrow. And _that’s_ where drugs get you.”

The air in the restaurant grew thin. Eric’s shoulders shirked up. His heart was hammering and it felt like it struck the inside of his chest in repeating and painful blows. “They can’t do that! It was my fault; he did it for me! I wanted...”

“Well, you must be done with that now,” his dad explained. “I think you need to delete the account entirely--”

“I worked for years on that channel!” he shouted. Out of the corner of his eye he saw the waitress duck out the door. “And that guy you think you know so well--he’s the only person I’ve met who actually gives a shit about me and my videos! What would getting him fired even accomplish?!”

His dad’s eyes grew narrow. “Having him fired would accomplish nothing for me. That is the dean’s prerogative, not mine,” he stated in a cold, flat tone. “And he’s made his decision.”

“Great, then I’m dropping out.”

“Listen to me now,” his dad spat, fist nearly hitting the salad plate. “You drop out; you can kiss your trust fund, your place in my home, and your collection of gadgets building dust in the basement goodbye! You are my _son_! At least to preserve _your_ options, I am willing to compromise _everything_!”

Eric went still, feeling the calamity of his prison walls in that one shift of energy between his dad and him. His dad had never threatened to kick him out before. “You...” he said, reaching up to scrape the tears off his face with the sleeve of Ira’s shirt. “Are you saying there _is_ a compromise?”

Now his dad sat up. He smoothed a hand down his suit front, flattening the bob in his tie in a reflexive habit, thoughtful, but never taking his eyes off Eric. “I think you could do very well in business; your stubborn temerity mixed with your ability to detect when something is required tells me you are a Vidal in your blood.”

“So, if I do what you want, if I get my business degree, you leave him alone; that’s what you’re saying, isn’t it?”

“You go back to school, Eric,” his dad said in quieter, eerily _warmer_ tones. “You finish your degree, then you _build_ something of your own, and only _then_ you can do _whatever_ you want.”

“And Ira?” It felt strange to say his name in front of his parents, like a muted confession because of the bullet of pain that came with it. “He keeps his job? Nothing changes for him?”

“I will call the dean and the head of his department. He can find some other pocket to squeeze while you are making something of your life, but that is the only thing he will lose.”

His dad gestured suddenly in the direction of the tea room entrance where the host, another man and the original waitress were watching with guarded expressions, clearly on standby for an incident.

“It’s all fine,” Eric’s dad called at them. “Some champagne for the table, I think? My son is becoming a man today.”

His mom had gotten up to reach for him, but Eric stepped away, grabbing himself, circling his arms because for a wild moment he felt like his own body was going to dismantle on its own, legs, arms, being; they didn’t matter. He sat down; simply dropped into the cushioned chair, sitting in the aftermath of his tears and the wide chasm of loss in his chest.

~*~

His dad had a meeting a little further in town so he’d dropped Eric and his mom off in Hayes Valley. His mom was a big supporter of the medicinal effect of the odd cadent murmur of comfort between holding new brand-name shirts up to his chest. Eric simply followed, staring at everything in _UnionMade Goods_ blindly between scrubbing his hands over his eyes because they kept burning hot with new tears.

“You’re still very young, Eric,” she said placatingly at one point when he exited a dressing room in an outfit she liked a lot better on him. She smoothed his hair with her hand, examining the product free fringes of it with visible dissatisfaction. “When you have a degree, this will all just be a bad dream. Don’t cry, my dear; you’ll make new, _better_ friends.”

Eric looked at her, _really_ looked at her. Her teal sun hat she’d adjusted to bend just-so at the brim to shade the pale shimmering tasteful orange on her eyelids. Her expression wrinkled with real worry when he let out a shuddering breath; his rib cage still full of the heat of his next sob.

“I think I’m in love with him, Mama,” he confessed in a rush, watching her eyebrows rise under the shadow of her hat.

Her lips formed a thin red-lipped line and her hand fell from his hair to his cheek, stroking the tender skin under his eyes with her thumb as her own eyes crinkled at the edges, a deep cut of sympathy. “Oh, my _baby_ ,” she sighed, and Eric almost felt a staggering relief until she continued with the most profound edge of pleading in that special way only a mother can beg. “Please, _please_ don’t ever say this to your father.”

~*~

It was well into the evening, past dinner and the streetlights were on when they drove him directly to his dorm and his dad was adamant about watching him stomp up the Bowles Hall steps with all the printed brand clothing bags balanced on one hand.

Eric went all the way up to his room, dropping everything on the floor of his wardrobe, blessedly relieved to see his roommate wasn’t around. With the way he felt, he was spoiling for a messy fight, and that would probably get him expelled anyway.

And then Ira would get fired.

Eric pulled out his phone for the first time since the restaurant. He had avoided looking at it because he didn’t want to feel his dad’s stare at him in the rearview, with his speculations.

Ira had texted him. Sometime around five. _**Considered making a Vine account today. Until I saw some freshman singing ‘ I’m in love with the Coco’ at his phone by Sather Gate. Another day in the wild surviving Vine. **_

Eric huffed out the first laugh he’d had all day, but it was soaked in ache. They were going to be watched very closely now, and his dad was expecting to be sent the confirmation that he’d deleted the account by tomorrow or he would revoke the second donation to the school.

He texted back. _**Are you at your place?**_

He watched the bubbles of Ira’s quick keys going before his reply leapt up on his screen. _**nope. i was curious to see if the Cal cults had gotten you so I came back to campus.**_

Eric swallowed and walked over to sit on the edge of his abandoned bed, immediately mournful. It was softer than Ira’s. _**What if I literally just joined a cult? Like if I started paying dues to have Bible verses emailed to me everyday. What if it’s a murder cult and that’s how they reel me in?**_

Ira’s voice felt ever strong even in his texting voice. _ **even murder cults are all about money i’d just sell Ms. Monroe to get you back. the pawn shops by my place are generous for celebrity memorabilia.**_

He texted back so fast, he almost hurt his right thumb. _**You’d sell your M.M. record??? No pawn shop could ever give you enough for that! Just let the cult have me, fuck!**_

Ira was typing. The bubbles appeared, then vanished. A pause, then the typing bubble bloomed up again. Finally **: _it’s all just things, eric, the poetry i wanna keep, and it’s all in my head._**

Eric stared and stared at his phone screen, reading and re-reading the words like they were lines in a book he couldn’t really grasp. He understood, of course; it was just so much at once to process. He liked him so, so much and it wasn’t fair. He was convinced that even if he powered through four years of this school just to keep his parents happy, he would still want Ira just as much after.

Would Ira wait all that time? He’d probably move from T.A. to research assistant or he’d write some book that Eric already wanted to read front to back and become all the more elusive. Eric was losing him no matter what, but if he could just...

_**Meet me outside Bowles Hall under the archway furthest to the right.** _

~*~

Ira was waiting almost exactly where Eric hoped he’d be, perched on one of the stone platforms, palms behind him, looking up at the sky. He heard Eric approach and the eyes he turned on him were glassy, exhausted, but relieved. He hopped down off his seat, seemed to be suddenly unsure how to approach, arms lifted for a moment before he dropped them; his mouth turned up in an asking smile.

Ira’s classes usually went for four hours at a time, and as soon as he was done, he’d be back. It was the first time they had been apart for this long. Eric didn’t think about it, didn’t even want to; he walked to him with his arms reached out. He grabbed Ira, enfolding him in the tightest embrace, and he was shaking as Ira hummed a greeting into his hair.

“Mmm, _so_ glad the cultists didn’t get ya.”

Eric held on, fingers closed tight against Ira’s palpable, living skin that was not even a memory yet; he felt like he was trying to steal something. He _wanted_ to be able to steal and preserve the smells, sounds, and sensations of Ira in his hands, all so real like he couldn’t imagine anything else was ever going to be again.

“Hey, _hey_ , what’s wrong?” Ira’s hands smoothed along his shoulders, gripping him enough to pull him back and look at him and Eric was distraught about it. “You’re shaking like a leaf; what happened? Did you…”

Eric looked at him, and was immediately fraught with the irritation that his eyes were filling with tears again. He didn’t want to tell Ira. He didn’t want Ira to see him cry. He didn’t want any of it to be real. “Can we just…” He reached up, palms against Ira’s neck, tugging him down into his mouth.

Ira’s eyes were diamond glitters under his eyelashes and his lips were dry, but he brushed like thin paper against Eric’s lips. It was like a touch caught between a careful maybe and a perfect finally. Their kiss turned into catching bites and Eric couldn’t stop breathing so rapid and hurt, wrapping heat up against Ira. He knew he wasn’t clearheaded himself, but aside from the realities of loss and goodbyes and change, this Ira, just starting to warm in his hands, he knew would always be the same and perfect.

“I just want to be alone with you right now,” he told him. “Can we go back to your apartment?”

“Yeah, yeah of course,” Ira said.

~*~

During the UberX ride, Ira was rolling them a joint, ground up weed on the lid of his metal cigarette tin. He did it with surprising dexterity considering the way the route had them climbing and descending a few hills.

“Is that the indica?” Eric asked, trying to ground himself back in their world together.

“Nah, this is the hybrid. You looked like you needed something to help you unwind. Honestly, it felt like a hectic day for me as well. I got called in not long after you left; Prof wanted me to help him draft and edit like _six_ different research papers. Felt like the doomsday prepper equivalent to Transcendentalism, but without the white supremacy…”

Eric leaned his head on the headrest, pressing his palms to his eyes. “Ugh, god,” he moaned. The professor had probably been notified that Ira’s contract was up for review.

“I meant that for doomsday preppers, not transcendentalists…” Ira continued around the rolling paper he was striping across his tongue to seal it. “In case you’re wondering. Allen Ginsberg was an activist. Made our Ms. Monroe right at home in her craft and understanding of the meaning of jazz and its direct correlation with the suffering and systemic abuse of people of colour; and of queer youth.”

Eric huffed out a soft laugh. “Pretty sure there was a movie about him last year. _Kill Your Darlings._ I saw a trailer for it but I feel like I’d appreciate it better _now_ , the romanticism of college, learning about the world, poetry, and meeting someone…” He looked at the neon stripes of light cascading across Ira’s features as their Uber crossed the middle of downtown. “...someone breathtaking.”.

“Oho, _wow_.” Ira beamed, tittering a little and biting his own lip at him. “Do go on.”

Eric smiled for real. “Miraculous?”

Ira laughed harder for that one. ”Now I’m just embarrassed,” He shrugged philosophically. “It’s my own fault for wanting to hear you say nice things about me.”

“People never really shower over the top compliments anymore,” Eric mused. “Not unless it’s in a movie.”

“You make me want to watch more film,” Ira responded.

“Yeah?”

“Oh yeah. Interesting title for a movie by the way. I like when screen artists state their themes on the masthead of their work.”

Eric felt immediately drunk on the phrase _screen artists._ He wanted to climb right into Ira’s head again. ”What do you predict the theme is for a movie called _Kill Your Darlings_? All I keep thinking is the first lines of _Fight Club_.”

“You and that movie…” Ira gestured affectionately, but then emphatically, nearly dropping the joint because the Uber was pulling up to Ira’s. “ _I_ know this one, just a sec--”

Eric laughed as Ira threw all six feet and some change of himself out the Uber door before him. Eric followed, almost ploughing into him as they hit the curb, but Ira caught hold of him.

“ _You know how they say you only hurt the ones you love? Well, it works both ways,_ ” he quoted at Eric in his richest storyteller voice. Eric paused, hands curled in Ira’s jacket, not expecting the words to land so cruelly on him. “If we’re actually getting into proverbs, the concept behind kill your darlings isn’t exactly the same.”

Eric extricated himself. There was no way he was going to be able to tell him tonight. He was furious with himself for feeling so happy so easily. “It isn’t, huh?” he mumbled, acting suddenly preoccupied with giving his Uber review on his phone.

His dad had texted him. **I will be in my office at 8am TOMORROW. I will call to request the meeting with that man’s superiors once you’ve sent confirmation the videos are deleted.**

Ira walked backward toward his front steps. “Well, Arthur Quiller-Couch said it and he meant it in reference to the temptation to get attached to the first version of your work to the detriment of your edit, but I know that isn’t you because your final cuts are always far and away better than your raw footage--you make shots look like they were plucked straight out of your own head. ”

Eric laughed as he pocketed his phone, biting back his own flushed smile. “What is that, revenge for earlier?”

“Exactly, you breath-taking and world-changing genius, you.” Ira smirked at him. “What do you say we go inside and just _assault_ each other with embarrassing compliments?”

Eric laughed even harder at that, breathlessly following Ira up inside his place.

Sometime during their day apart, Ira had opened the curtains of his window. The night spilled so naked in the room, streetlights spilling somber yellow over Ira’s bed. Ira stepped against him after he closed the door, cupped his cheeks and gave him a long slow kiss; careful and clear in its intent.

“Can I get you out of those clothes?” he whispered over Eric’s lips, parting on them and teasing Eric’s lower lip into his mouth.

“Uh huh,” Eric replied eloquently.

It honestly didn’t occur to Eric until Ira had unbuttoned his brand new shirt, tugged it off his shoulders and set on his belt buckle--unwrapping it from its clasp and smoothing it off his hips with his palms--that Ira was being sweet and gentle with him in a very special performative way. He knew Eric was upset, distracted, confused, and he was taking care of him.

Eric sighed when Ira took him by the wrist, walking them toward the bed. Eric, now only in his boxer-briefs, tried fruitlessly to help Ira undress as well, but he did a very uncharacteristically rough thing and pushed Eric back so he landed on the mattress in Ira’s pillows.

“Hey, what the hell?” Eric practically yelled.

“Stay put,” Ira responded firmly around a puerile smile and dropped the joint in Eric’s lap. “You can light that for us and watch.”

Eric huffed out a shocked, delighted laugh. He feigned exasperation as he took Ira’s Zippo from Ira’s makeshift bedside table. They hadn’t turned on a single light so the flame from the lighter blew up a lovely orange glow on Ira as Eric lay back on his elbows, and watched him grab his own shirt at the hem and slip it up and over his head, leaving a mussed up mess of his long hair hanging like an offended mop on his head. Eric watched greedily as he sucked on the joint’s tip, waiting for it to catch flame. He let the twist of paper flicker for a brief second because Ira’s hands were on his jeans button, pale knuckles in the stark evening light twisting the button undone.

He dropped his jeans and underwear, and Eric blew out the flame. Ira moved over him, straddling his thighs; the weight of his knees pressed a leveled pressure on either side of him. Eric put the joint in his mouth and sucked a long indulgent hit, watching Ira watch him, his eyes were flaming dew drops in the dark.

“Don’t inhale,” Ira ordered, leaning down to catch his wrist and taking the joint from him. He held it aloft. “Open your mouth.”

Eric did. It was hot on his tongue, and he didn’t breathe, and his hips canted upward of their own volition when Ira opened his mouth on his and inhaled. The heat of his lips mixed with the way his ribs expanded, taking the smoke in, sucking in every last bit of it from Eric’s mouth turned him to jelly. It melted into a smoke-covered kiss and Eric felt it stream out of his nostrils as he exhaled while Ira sucked on his tongue hungrily.

Truthfully, this felt different. Usual attraction and warmth were evident in the pit of his stomach but there was some fear there. Determination perhaps? Eric knew he was supposed to tell Ira about everything, but he didn’t want to think about it now; he couldn’t when Ira was the most delicious thing he’d ever touched. Eric found his feelings about it were now fuelled with a deeper ferocity.

There was a word for that. Definitely.

Ira crawled up him, and it wasn’t fair how naked they were already because Eric already compulsively kept grabbing at Ira’s hips and rocking them together. It was his favourite feeling; the hard, holistic heat of Ira’s cock bent up along his; the way it made Ira clench his teeth. Eric tossed his head back and kissed Ira on his jaw just as Ira reached with his other hand between them to the shaft of Eric’s cock and his. He squeezed them together and Eric groaned, mouthing down his throat. Ira leaned into it, inclining his head back down enough to get at Eric’s lips again, wrist sliding upward above Eric’s head, joint still in his fingers.

“Don’t light my hair on fire,” Eric whispered, and Ira’s laugh sounded so sexy like that, faint and groaning that Eric reached between them, closed a hand on Ira’s to make him clench on him tighter. That made Ira break into plaintive panting and Eric was very smug about that.

“Eric baby,” Ira breathed on his throat, thrusting himself hard through Eric’s fingers and Eric’s skin crawled alive with goosebumps. The tip of Ira’s cock licked up the tops of his knuckles. “I wanna fuck tonight.”

He properly shivered at that. “Whatever you want,” he gasped. “Always, whenever--I don’t know. Just tell me what to do.”

Ira ate the laugh out of his mouth, body vibrating with his own rush of breathy laughter. He broke off their kiss, lips flushed and so dark when he brought the joint up to his lips again. He’d rolled it tight enough that it was burning slow. They didn’t speak another word, which was definitely a rare thing for them.

He watched the smoke spill over Ira’s teeth, a thick, white, heavy pour of shadowy waterfall-like waves one over the other. It was entrancing enough in the cool Autumn night blue behind them that Eric followed his own whim, leaned up and opened his mouth over it, inhaling his hit before Ira’s lips closed on his.

“Hold your breath,” Ira whispered before sliding his tongue over Eric’s, eating the rest of the smoke still floating in Eric’s mouth.

Eric didn’t breathe, eyes shut, languidly didn’t realise he was rocking against Ira so hard. He pressed his forehead into Ira’s neck in an erotic chill; practically a flinch. He was so hard, rubbing lazy, but hungry circles on Ira’s thigh, leaving a hot sticky pressure behind him. He started to rut against him more insistently, the feeling got heady and he grit his teeth. He was fully high now and everything on him was just sensation and liquid languorous arousal.

“You can breathe out now,” Ira hissed, fingers tipping Eric’s head back to kiss down his neck.

He was going to anyway; the feeling of Ira’s hot palm closing on him was startlingly perfect. Eric’s lungs burned as he let the smoke go; there was hardly any left to see; he was gasping a little but trembling because it felt suddenly like there were arcs on the edge of his vision, pulling his pupils large and then small again. Ira hummed amusement, looking up at him, his eyes hooded and bleary.

He was so gorgeous, it was stupid. Eric was overthinking again. He was supposed to be saying goodbye. Instead he was here, laying naked under him and trying to press his dick harder into his skin, pained by the pressure and wishing there was more.

“I was planning to fuck you into this mattress tonight,” Ira said to him, slurring the words into his skin as Eric rocked harder into him, grunting helplessly. “But I think...you wanna fuck me, don’t you?”

“I’m gonna fucking come if you keep talking to me like that,” Eric growled through his grit teeth. He could barely open his eyes and when he did, the image of Ira on top of him was spangled with the long streaks of his own wet eyelashes. “Yeah, and I kinda do.”

Ira reached over to stub the joint out on their little tray on the window sill. “You kinda do what?” he asked distractedly.

Eric smiled shyly. “Huh?”

Ira was upright on his knees then; his hooded bedroom eyes fixed down on him in that way Eric liked so much. “Don’t get coy with me now. I wanna hear you say it.”

Eric covered his face with his hands, laughing reflexively, falling into it deeper because he was so stoned. Ira’s hands closed on his wrists again, prying them away to make Eric look up at him again. “ _Ira_ ,” he whined.

Ira was smiling fully now, thoroughly entertained. “Tell me you wanna fuck me,” he prompted.

“ _Fuck,”_ Eric moaned wearily.

“Halfway there. Come on, the way you said you wanted to suck me off our first night together made me so hot,” Ira crooned, starting a scintillating massage down from his wrists to his biceps, smoothing palms along them and pressing longingly along the muscle there. “I like how you make dirty words sound, Eric.”

Eric felt like a damn highschooler, but Ira was still all over him and his skin was still cloying for more touch; he was flushed so hard, his face was burning. “I want to fuck you,” he gasped, saying it almost too succinctly and carefully. He, if it was at all possible, flushed even deeper.

Ira leaned back down and kissed him, groaning indulgently. “Since it’s your first time, would you rather just watch first?” he asked.

Eric nodded, but he had no idea what that meant until Ira rolled off of him and started to rifle through the miscellaneous clutter on his bedside trunk before he appeared to find a white and blue tube. He slipped back onto the bed and pushed at least two pillows behind his head and slid one more under his tailbone. Eric sat back, uncertain what to do, but completely rapt at the image Ira was making for him. The unabashed pour of clear slippery lube on his fingers, the way he bent his knees--the impossibly long line of his calves parallel to the view of the pert curve of his ass; then the way his wet lube-coated index finger slid down past his balls, touched the tender-looking skin behind them further down to the exposed pink ring of his opening.

It was a painfully slow slide in, and Eric couldn’t look away

Ira’s left leg slipped over the side of the bed so that Eric was treated to a pure and unshadowed view of Ira’s hand twisting uncomfortably, and the wet swallow as his finger disappeared inside him shallowly, not much deeper than up to the first knuckle.

His long fingers were a sight, soaked with lube, sucked wetly every time he thrusted inside himself stretching, sliding in. Eric’s mouth fell open when he saw the way Ira parted his fingers at the knuckle and drew out slow. With a caught, desperate moan, Ira hiked himself upward into his own reaching touch. His slick rim seemed to mould to the shape of his own gorgeous fingers, but what kept Eric’s gaze was mainly the way Ira was positioned; head propped on the pillows, pale stomach bunched up with his hard, leaking cock flat against it, leaving a vibrant glaze of come up his belly, eyes watery gorgeous brown only now fixed right on Eric. Taking Eric in with every flutter of his eyelashes and thrust of his fingers, sizing Eric up as his vision seemed blurred with aching want, bottom lip caught under his teeth, devouring Eric with his eyes as if Eric were the one sliding hot, wet fingers into him and curling them up like that, making him burn and tremble.

He was so overcome that, without thinking, Eric choked out the air he never inhaled.

“You wanna come over here?” Ira broke their silence, low and musical, and Eric swallowed, nodded; unable to find the _right_ kind of “yes please” he wanted to say to being granted something this daunting and miraculous all at once.

The bare skin of Ira's hips burnt Eric's palms. Ira spread his thighs so Eric could kneel between them, and Eric did; slid both hands down the elegantly muscled stretch of one thigh and grasped the knee firmly, lifted it up and to the side.

Eric felt more anxious than he had even come close to their first night together. Perhaps because the Indica hybrid was hitting him differently than a drop of acid, but his mind was racing as he uncapped the bottle. He let it pour down the fingers of his left hand, index and middle finger coated until it pooled over the meat of his hand. He looked at Ira at last, a little terrified that Ira would see every notion of plain greed for him that was in his chest and the worry about what losing him was going to feel like.

Ira simply observed him with something like uncertain disquiet and a bemused smile as if he could see something in Eric’s expression. Eric let it break into his worst thought as he let the ‘v’ of his hand follow the flow from Ira’s ankle to the back of his knee, hiking him up on one arm so he’d be elevated. Ira made a low hungry noise as Eric pressed in up to the knuckle. He spread both fingers slowly until Ira’s right hand clutched the sheets and he let the other, still slick hand drop back near his head, fingers curled. Eric copied him and pulled out slow, fingers still spread, watched Ira’s mouth fall open in a sudden branded shock, before he twisted in a deeper angle putting Ira in a surprising arch above the mattress, splayed out and beckoning under Eric.

It was simply the way he was staring at Eric with nothing short of full yearning that had Eric utterly done in. There was _so much_ of him and Eric was suddenly overwhelmed with the thought that Ira had given every inch of himself to him. Eric pressed his knees under him and Ira moved from his hips up in an almost practiced flex.

He _was_ a dream: deadly stark, gleaming skin and his completely hard cock leaving a clear string of pre-come along his stomach.

“If I come right away, can we say it’s because I’m stoned?” Eric offered in their heavy pause, trying not to think too much about first times and last times.

“We can say whatever you want,” Ira whispered back; his grin in the dark was comfort enough and that made it worse somehow.

Bracing one hand on Ira’s thigh and keeping the other hooked under Ira, Eric rose on his knees. He pulled Ira back on him and Ira yanked harder on the sheet so it slid up with him. Eric shuddered at the touch of his own hand as he guided himself into Ira. The sensation of Ira's opening pressing around him made him utter a soft sound, lightning shocks of sensation he had never quite had before shooting through him. And then... _oh_. He got braver, hungrier, and he heard Ira growl out an imperceptible curse because he eased in deeper past the head of his cock.

Then Ira's body _opened_ for him in a hot velvety swallow, sheathed him in tight heat as Eric pushed in and seated himself fully into Ira with a single hammering thrust. Ira groaned, a slow voiced exhale, eyes wide and locked on Eric's with something almost like awe. That was...

Eric couldn’t look away; leaned forward, dragged by a force as irresistible as gravity. The kiss they fell into was slow but deep, dizzying. Underneath his hand, the pulse at the base of Ira's throat was strong and fast, beating against Eric's palm. Something changed, then, between one heartbeat and the next, at some point during the short space of time that they kissed. Eric could feel the difference as he pulled back – something had shifted, or... but it didn’t matter, not now.

He pulled back slowly, so slowly, and pushed back in only a little faster. The sensation of Ira's body tight and hot and perfect around him thrilled through him, sucking around his cock and curling through his scrotum and shivered outwards along every nerve of his body, and, oh, yes, just like that, just like…

It was a perfect angle and it had Ira’s hand scrambling across the edge of the mattress, rocked with the pace Eric started to move. Ira couldn’t move under him and Eric felt that, felt how helpless he was as he grabbed for the bed and began to gasp with each thrust. Eric was overcome, completely swallowed tight and breathless in Ira’s heat. For an instant of pure, rapturous pleasure, it was almost enough.

And then it wasn’t. He thrust into Ira again, pressed deep and circled his hips, and Ira moaned, clenching around Eric's cock. Yes, that was… amazing, but then the hunger grew and it was not enough, even for an instant, nowhere near enough.

Eric slid his hands along Ira's thighs, curled them around the insides of his knees and leaned back so he could watch himself, watch his erection disappear into Ira's body again and again. He sped up after the first couple of thrusts; couldn’t stop himself and didn’t try, because Ira was hissing breaths through his teeth, hot and wanton and willing and twisting--not trying to control his pace, not doing anything but giving himself up to what Eric was giving him.

“Harder, Eric.” Ira’s voice was muted, eyes fetched to the ceiling, his whole, long, beautiful body pulled like taffy and begging. “ _Please_.”

Eager to please, Eric shifted forward and grabbed Ira's hips and fucked him as hard and as fast as he really wanted, as hard and as fast as he _physically could_. The sound of his balls slapping against Ira and the growling little gasps that sounded like they were being torn from Ira with the rasp of Eric's own harsh panting filled his world, and Ira was so, so--

Eric could hardly breathe, wasn’t breathing at all, and there was this second where the hunger and pleasure and want raging inside him were almost too much because, with every thrust and every gasp and every spark of sensation, the tension mounted higher. It drew him up tighter and tighter, desperate and urgent and then, _then._

He didn’t think to pull out, but Ira’s long arms had already reached down, thighs riding up high and flexible; and with ease, he pulled Eric in harder, made him come in to the hilt and Eric shuddered through his orgasm, feeling it warm and thick around his twitching cock, spilling up and pouring down, not deep enough to keep from spilling around the edges. He was sweating and gasping for air, the air around them lazy with sex, and Ira had pulled him taut against him, was licking and sucking and biting the tender skin of his throat. Eric pulled out, feeling sensitive but embarrassingly aware that Ira hadn’t come yet. He felt his impatience in the thrum of his heartbeat and the way he writhed at every point of contact between them.

Ira's cock lay long and absurdly elegant against his stomach, thicker than every time Eric remembered; it curved slightly and it looked almost painfully engorged. But when Eric curled a careful hand around it, Ira lifted into the touch and gave a strangled almost-whisper, and there was nothing but dark, fierce hunger in his stare.

Eric watched him, slipping his fingers back inside him. He was still loose, but hot from the friction. The slippery slick mess of Eric’s come and lube was all over him and all over Eric’s fingers now, too. Eric pressed three fingers inside him without a warning and felt a lingering curl of arousal sizzle through him when Ira’s head snapped back against the pillows and his one long leg slipped off the bed. He twitched and shuddered, every line of his body vibrating.

This part he was getting used to. He opened his mouth on Ira’s cock, closing his lips around him in one motion. Maybe the high made it easier, but his throat relaxed right away. He knew Ira was looking down at him, fistfuls of the sheets in his hands as Eric sunk his fingers to the hilt inside him. He made a beckoning noise and Ira took the hint and started to recklessly fuck Eric’s mouth while Eric finger-fucked him. His cock striped solid and hot under the rove of his lips and tongue, and his mouth watered until it was just slack and wet, taking Ira’s cock to the back of his throat in painful but satisfying thrusts. He didn’t have to move his hand as with every thrust, Ira had to fall back and fuck himself on Eric’s fingers.

He must have been so far gone on their high because he hadn’t even realised Ira was coming before he felt the faint echo taste of salt on the back of his tongue.

“You’re a fucking wonder, Eric,” Ira sighed at him, catching his breath. “Get up here.”

Eric climbed up him, straddling his hips and kissed him sticky and soft until Ira was bubbling with laughter because now there was come all over the both of them, and Eric had got lube in his hair at some point.

“I want water,” Eric moaned, not wanting to get up. His thighs were already burning. “And maybe another hit of that joint.”

“I’ll get you the fucking stars and moon, beautiful,” Ira sighed, breath still coming in fast, his heart still hammering under the raven tattoo Eric was now tracing his wet sticky fingers over, and Eric was listening to it as calm and sated in a vicious clarity that no one else on the planet was going to make him feel this way.

~*~

It must have been close to four a.m. when he woke again. He wasn’t aware of what woke him until he felt the ticklish heat of Ira’s breath over his ear and how swelteringly hot it was under the covers.

It felt like a dizzy bliss to be sober again, comfortable and aching in his thighs from last night.

At some juncture while he was sleeping, they had wound up in a bit of a cluster with Eric’s back to Ira with Ira pushed against him like a magnet, having flung a long arm around his ribs. Ira had at some point slipped one leg between his and Eric could feel the weight of Ira’s chin on his head.

There was something liberating about being under the hot cave of Ira’s blankets. Eric didn’t feel any anxiety; just Ira’s soft, shallow breaths. He felt groggy, but his mind was racing, heart thudding up a wet beat on his ribs. Ira’s fingers curled over Eric’s stomach, his breathing had changed and he was awake. Eric wanted to reach for his wrist, melt back against him and push Ira’s fingers around his dick again, start the day this way, and act like nothing had changed.

The cool dawn was creeping over the hills, a milky shade of yellow and pink. Perhaps one last warm day in October. Ira was going to get a call in a few hours to go in for an enquiry and he was going to be fired if Eric kept procrastinating.

“Hey,” he said aloud instead, his voice was rough from sleep.

“Mmm, hey,” Ira said against the shell of his ear; his odd singsong voice vibrating through Eric’s skin.

“Ira, what do you...want to do with your life?” He hated the phrasing of the question the moment it fell out of his mouth because Ira rose up on one elbow, and Eric leaned his head back on the pillow to look at him. “I mean, the fact that you’re a teaching assistant about to be fast-tracked to a research assistant for your department head is beyond anything I could ever even think of pursuing ambitiously.”

Ira smiled, pushing his hair out of his face and tucking it behind his ear. “You tryin’ to butter me up or something? Because it’s working; whatever you want, I’m your man. With the caveat that if it involves getting dressed, I need either a cigarette or a coffee.”

Eric got up, reaching over to grab his shorts off the floor to slip into them. It was getting increasingly stupid of him not to broach the subject properly. It was breaking his heart worse trying to hang on to the precious remnants of what they had together when he had a couple hours left before the rest of the world woke up. He rested a knee on the mattress, half standing, arms folded. “This is about yesterday, Ira.”

Ira watched him for a delicate moment, eyes searching his before he sat up as well, wrapping the sheets around his knees. “Okay…” he said, nodding as he rested his back against the dead vines on his wall, that only his height let him reach, to properly face Eric. ”Okay?” he repeated.

Eric cleared his throat, looking out the window at the gleaming lines of roofs across the horizon, stretching out to Berkeley Hills looking soft and blue. He didn’t know how to explain it; he didn’t know how to say how sad and furious it made him. “My dad found out about the videos we’re making. And apparently the school knows as well.”

“Oh,” Ira said softly, a hesitant wry smile forming.

“He...spoke to the dean, and uh…they’re not going to dole out any discipline as long as, well, my dad gave them a lot of money, but he--you see he and I made a deal kinda....” Eric was already flushed about it. He was saying this _so_ badly. He took the weight off his knee and began to pace; something to do so he wouldn’t have to see the expression of puzzlement on Ira’s face or the way it was slowly dawning on him just exactly what Eric was saying to him. “You gotta understand; I guess I never thought about the _school_ or my dad seeing our videos. I didn’t care, but I care about you--or--uh... _._ ”

Ira looped his hands over his upraised knees when Eric shot him a nervous glance. “So, this isn’t about you dropping out?” Ira asked in an even tone.

Eric sighed. “I _told_ him; I told both of them--my parents--that I wanted to quit business school but they weren’t having it and they _know_ about the videos and my dad knows things about you and he doesn’t understand, but _Jesus_ , Ira, I just don’t want you to get fired.”

“What...does your dad knowing things about me have to do with my being fired?” Ira was speaking slowly, measured and calmly. It was already driving Eric crazy. “Does he know that you’re not one of _my_ students?”

“That’s not--it’s about us breaking into the mine and filming it and the videos before that. My dad doesn’t...I mean it was never mentioned--he thinks you’re a friend.”

Ira’s eyebrows rose. “Ah,” was his flat delicate response.

“He never supported me making videos on Youtube and he’s being a snob about the fact that you don’t come from money, but I want you to know I don’t care about that at all.” He stopped pacing and looked at Ira whose gaze had been following him. “Ira, I _don’t_ care what he thinks.”

“Okay…so what’s this deal you made with him?”

Eric ran his hands through his hair. It sounded all the more awful the closer he got to saying it aloud. “I have to delete the videos; delete the channel. Also, I can’t...I can’t see you anymore.”

He watched Ira’s shoulders sink and his chest felt tight at the sight of it. “Right,” he said. “Of course.”

“...And if I do that, then he’ll cooperate with the dean for future fundraisers for both Haas and the centre for religious studies--and they can’t--at least you’ll keep your job…”

Ira didn’t reply; instead he looked out the window at the sunrise, his dark brown hair was a disaster on his head but his eyes were bright and clear, and they were definitely brimmed with moisture.

Eric felt his whole entire heart shatter.

He crossed the room again, clambering back on the bed to sit across from Ira, trying without asking to get Ira to look at him again.

“But that’s just the thing.” Eric shifted closer on the bed, reaching out and closing a hand on Ira’s arm. “I’ve been thinking since last night, what if we ignore all of it? We don’t _have_ to do exactly what they say--what if I switched the channel to your name, and we just--we could be a secret until I can get out of this place or until I turn twenty-one or--”

Ira was now looking down at his hands, his brow furrowed; his silence interrupted louder than anything he could have said.

“Please say something,” Eric mumbled, as if somehow he could stop himself from rambling, trying to talk that look off of Ira’s face.

Ira didn’t say anything for a protracted silence; he started to speak a few times with a short breath before pausing again. His eyes flickered up at Eric before he dropped his gaze again, his mouth a thin, unhappy line. “I’m trying to find the right way to say this, but...”

Eric didn’t know what to say _himself_. He felt like he’d just completely fucked up this whole delivery; not that he’d expected Ira to take this well, but…

“Look,” Ira continued at last. “We’ve only known each other a month, so my opinion hardly matters when it comes to how _you_ live your life, but if we had had more time to get to know each other then this would have been a lot more simple for us both.”

Eric stared at him, a growing dread crawling up his spine. “What do you mean…”

Ira still wouldn’t look at him; but he took a deep breath and broke into a smile that might easily have felt real if Eric didn’t recognise it. The very one he wore as he once spoke to Eric about corruption and thousands of human remains used to accessorise their school. “When you started this conversation, you asked me what I want out of my life, right?”

Eric’s voice barely made a sound when he replied, “Right.”

“ _Well_ , here’s my answer, Eric. I _want_ to live honestly and freely, regardless of what I’m working to achieve, and if that’s not what you’re ready for, then…” His eyes dragged with great reluctance from the landscape outside his window to Eric. They were red-rimmed, soaked with a hurt that seemed so far beyond just the two of them sitting across from each other. “...Then I don’t know what else we have to say to one another.”

God, it would have been better if he’d started shouting, crying, or _anything_. Eric sat there, speechless as Ira exhaled a long, shuddering breath, still staring out the window.

“I don’t get what you mean...” Eric mumbled. He stopped sharply because he heard the quiver in his own voice, raw and burning in his throat. “You sound so mad at me, but l...you know this isn’t what _I_ want, right?”

This time when Ira looked at him again, there was no reluctance and it was like the fall of mercury, icy and melting dark in his irises “You said you made a deal, Eric. It sounds to me like you already had your mind made up.”

Eric’s hands were fists on his lap. _Don’t cry._ “I’ve only been trying to explain what’s happening. It’s not what I _want_ , but--I get that I said it like…” He had agreed, but he had done it for Ira. “I just don’t want you to lose your job, and it’s not fair for either of us, but--”

Ira uttered a low, hollow laugh and everything about his countenance was cold, as if he’d shut down, no shred of remaining passion in the downward curl of his mouth as he said, “What would you know about what’s fair?”

Eric felt like he couldn’t breathe. “Why would you even say that?”

Ira barely moved, but Eric flinched when he snapped. “Because I’m _furious_ with you, Eric! You made a deal with your dad to buy your way back into a school you don’t even want to go to anymore, then you came here and you _fucked_ me last night just to tell me the next morning that you want me to be your dirty little secret. For some reason, you just _have_ to have both your dad’s money _and_ your youtube career and to cap it off, you’re pretending like I’m supposed to feel sorry for you because this is all supposed to be for _me_?”

Eric was so shellshocked, he just stared at Ira. His cheeks were already wet. He tried to speak, but what burst out of him was a sharp, hot hiccough. Ira was looking past him, a middle distance stare like looking at Eric sitting in front of him starting to choke on sobs was just as embarrassing for him as it was for Eric. “Ira, I’m sorry,” he sobbed. “I didn’t mean it that way at all.”

Ira shut his eyes at that, crushed them shut and his hands came up, with the sharp lines of his ribs on his naked chest contracting, he buried his face in his hands. “God, I really thought you were _different_. Everything was warning me to stay away from you….”

Eric thought to reach out, but he saw how Ira was twisted away from him in the short space between them, how despite his height, he’d curled up, knees drawn and face in his hands. He was so hurt, and Eric didn’t know how to fix it. He didn’t know how to make them okay again. “Ira?” he tried. “What--what do you want me to do?”

Ira emerged from his hands, eyes red and mouth set. “I don’t want you to do anything, Eric.” Exhaustion and surrender in the grains of his tones. “I don’t want to do whatever _this_ is. Please, can you just go?”

Eric slid off the bed, trying to swallow the shuddering sounds coming up out of his chest as his eyes streamed. He picked up his clothes and got dressed with trembling fingers, trying not to look back at Ira on the bed as he grabbed his phone. He felt like he couldn't walk. He felt like he was really dying. He had reached the door when he finally looked back. Ira had pulled his sheets and blankets up around himself, looking determinedly away from wherever Eric was.

He walked out the door and barely remembered tearing down the stairs to the front entrance because he felt like he blinked before he was sitting on the front steps, head in his arms, gasping out the volcanic air inside him, soaking his sleeves as he tried not to make a sound.

It was at least twenty minutes to a half hour before he was able to call an Uber and by that time, the sun had fully come up. A callous fever of unforgiving light washed over the city as Eric realised halfway back to the university campus that it was probably really over between them.

~*~

Looking back on it, Eric would remember how very little he felt, sitting on his own bed in his dorm room, dragging his cursor to the [ _Delete video]_ on each command on his screen. Next to the pouring landfill of loss, the empty room echo of hurt he kept drumming up when he thought of Ira--no, deleting the videos felt like nothing.

He kept mentally poring over the way Ira had asked him in such neat, polite words to leave. Something in the scratched injury of Ira’s voice right then and how he had tried to sound temperate made it so hard for Eric to find the viciousness to be angry with him.

As the week wore on, he considered texting Ira a few times, but every time he looked at the last words between them; the promise and affection, he was back in those last moments again trying to unwrap the layers of why-- _”I don’t want whatever this is”--_ why it felt like there was no reply he could give to that.

Probably because you couldn’t just convince someone to want you again.

There were these silences. Often. Just moments after he’d come back from a lecture and he sat down. He’d consider opening his music app on his phone and think with an almost terrified paralysis that he was just going to sit there and think of Ira again.

His mother would call, and her very ginger love for him, the tentative way she said, “I’ve arranged for us to take a trip at the end of your semester,” made him feel worse.

The worst of it came in the moments where he kept refreshing his empty youtube channel, kept reading his twitter mentions, seeing strangers asking about Ira, asking where the videos went and feeling no real relief in tweeting that he was taking some time away to focus on school.

The fact that he started to do his homework out of sheer boredom didn’t register for him until he was on his third week, lying awake in bed staring at his ceiling running through the taste of conversation on the breath of his memories. His brain kept twisting his favourite seconds into miniscule misreads: every moment Ira didn’t smile as big; every time he touched Ira and Ira didn’t respond.

God, and he knew how idiotic it was, but it didn’t stop the convicted sigh in his chest. The almost anger growing out of having something taken away, something he was never quite entitled to. It felt like a snap in him, anger with himself; how quickly he’d let Ira in, and how dumb it had to be to have wanted him so easily, to have wanted to give up everything for him. Who does things like that within a month of meeting someone?

He didn’t know what he wanted going forward, but he knew damn well that he was never going to let a guy make him feel so helpless and stupid ever again.

Eric started going out. Between classes, between memorisation of macroeconomics and belabouring through his math requirement, he went looking for social clubs, meetups on campus. He was smarter than a night of moping; he was _better_ than an Ira who had probably moved on. So, Eric worked viciously to move on, too, be functional. He was going to kill the shit out of his degree and then he could do what he wanted.

Whatever the hell that was supposed to be now.

> _November_
> 
> _2016 - One Year Later_

The trouble with smoking indoors was the way fresh smoke settled; it layered and sank to eye-level and just lingered folding in on itself like a faded cloud, and the smoke from a bong hit was always a little weightier. Eric exhaled and set the bong on the lacquered coffee table, resting his back against his friend Cleo’s leather sofa.

“What are you doing for your twentieth birthday?” she was saying

Eric was distracted as he’d just set the bong down on his application forms to change housing and there was now a wet ring on the one page he’d gotten around to fill out. “Motherfuck!” he snapped.

“Don’t think that’s legal, honey...unless you’re talking about _my_ mother...”

Eric snorted, looking up at her. They’d met after Calapalooza nine months ago. Eric had been trying casual hookups, party favours, molly and awkward blowjobs in unisex bathrooms plus one Grindr fuck in a dorm across campus, but it just wasn’t his stride. He wanted _friends_.

So, Eric had made the mistake of thinking he was going to make said friends at an open house for one of Cal’s most competitive clubs for those interested in acing econ. In a room packed to the brim with polo-shirted, khaki trimmed boys, and a few girls keeping justifiably to themselves, Cleo had pulled up right before orientation, all ripped jeans, crown of tight, mahogany curls, smokey brown eyeshadow and a laughing look when the recruiter asked her if she was lost.

It had to have been the first time since…months ago, that Eric had felt an inspiring edge to get someone on camera, to hear them talk...

He had approached her first once the orientation was over outside in the garden, but she was the one to point her vape pen at him knowingly.

“Tell me _you’re_ not trying to join an _econ_ club?” she’d said in a warm butterscotch voice while he took a hit.

“Well, what about you?” He was so sullen back then, still wincing and trying to feel human in public when people looked at him too long.

“Club secretary’s girlfriend left her Finance intro textbook in my studio,” she supplied, and she _really_ looked at him through a startling pair of green eyes the colour of a bay along a West Indies coast. She saw him drop his gaze uncomfortably and shrugged as she rested her weight on the stone balustrade.

There was a careful silence after she spoke that made Eric ask. “Are you a business major?”

She twisted, rust yellow sweater a pale picture against the green trimmed shrubbery behind her, and she had pretty laugh lines defined under her gold freckled skin. “I’m a year away from a composition program in music,” she’d said. “The secretary’s girlfriend...just _really_ likes music, you know?”

Eric liked _her_ immensely from that moment. He had been sort of worried he’d tumble into a whole other heartbreak waiting to happen, but Cleo had a vision for where she wanted to be, was easy to hang out with because she didn’t want anything from him other than a good laugh and a few hard talks about social awareness. She just got him, in this weird sort of uncomfortable with being sober in social settings, trust fund kid with an artist’s frustration way.

Her mom was an investor in several clothing brands and her dad was an East African poet and they’d spoiled her rotten, but travel, bisexuality, loneliness, and music had made her so ferocious about human rights and open expressions of love that Eric couldn’t not want to be better, more awake, around her.

Ira would have loved her to bits.

It didn’t matter, though, even if Eric was beginning to need her because she was a musician before she was anything else to anyone. She’d let Eric sit and brood until he came out of his shell while she got into her wires, her keyboard, guitar, and amp surrounding her while she composed track after track dedicated to a pain she never talked about. They’d smoke up together and have long talks, watch arthouse movies Eric hadn’t given the time of day to before, and once or twice, he kissed her but it usually flatlined for him when they tried anything more than that. She was so damn kind about it; she’d joke about how they were both too gay for each other anyway, which wasn’t enitirely the truth.

Eric just didn’t know what the truth of that was supposed to be.

Of course she was transferring to UCLA next semester, and Eric had been working very hard not to be embarrassingly weepy about it.

Current Cleo had a pair of headphones perched off one ear, her hair got up in a gorgeous set of thick locs with pink thread weaved through them. Current Cleo also had an eyebrow quirked as she waited for him to catch up with her mentally.

“I’m turning _twenty-one_ , for the record, and I don’t _know_ what I’m doing,” he told her, unable to keep the mustard out of it. “Probably nothing because you’re leaving me for LA.”

Her bright eyes rolled. “That’s why I was asking you, you big baby. And it’s great you’re turning twenty-one because guess what’s legal in a week?”

Eric shrugged. “Like weed being legal even affects me.”

“Yeah, but it affects all the unjust incarceration of other men of colour,” she offered in simple admonishing tones, multitasking on her music software while she spoke. “Anyway, I’m trying to invite you to come housewarm my new studio in LA next weekend. We’ll get tanked, buy some molly, they’ll let you in a club that Friday because you’ll be twenty-one by midnight, then you can be a good friend and come to my first stage show in WeHo on Saturday night. Sunday you fly back and you’re good to go for classes on Monday.”

Eric, cowed and embarrassed to be caught slipping, perked up. “That’s actually... something I wanna do.”

She laughed at him. “Surprise, surprise. Don’t think I didn’t notice you avoid all my shows in South Berkley. You’ve only seen my on-campus shows; you’re a shit groupie and you know it.”

Eric carefully made it look like he was reading the fine print on his housing form. Explaining to Cleo that he’d shacked up with a religious studies TA in the first month of his freshman year seemed mortifying now. Particularly because Cleo had a certain sardonicism when it came to hipster white guys. Worse still, because he hadn’t spoken his name aloud since that day...

“Guess I still need to put in the time to unlock whatever _that_ look on your face means,” she sang into her mic with her autotune switched on, and smirked at her screen when Eric groaned loudly.

~*~

He had to hand it to her. Cleo had caught onto him pretty quick even though she didn’t out and out ask. Berkeley was a big enough campus that Eric shouldn’t have felt nervous about running into Ira, but there were times when it seemed very likely. He’d become terrified of the notion that he’d be out on the town, trying to have fun, and he’d just _see_ him and that he’d be the same and that Eric would revert to the guy he was that final morning.

And that wasn’t even the worst case scenario. The worst case scenario was actually a reality where Ira had moved on and Eric, still the same and trying to be normal; trying to act like it didn’t tear him to shreds to picture Ira pressing his smile on someone else’s throat.

So, if it was the occasional slam poetry night, a silent protest at Sather gate; or even a workshop he would have been interested in otherwise, he’d come up with some excuse not to be there. He was excited enough about his marketing projects and research that school wasn’t mind-numbing anymore, so he’d developed a very careful way of taking on extra credit when Cleo wanted to swim in circles that might, by some miniscule chance, have Ira in them.

So, for his twenty-first birthday to be in another city completely felt vastly freeing. He wanted to show Cleo he could be a good time, then he would be over it all and maybe, just maybe the scope of his future, of his relationship with videography and sex wouldn’t seem so empty going forward.

LA beckoned. Cleo had already been living between Cal and LA as she completed her final credits for transfer. Her mom had leased a new penthouse studio apartment in Westwood, and from the sounds of it, Cleo had already found her niche there, knew all the pit stops and most importantly, who was holding.

 _ **It’s your weekend!**_ Cleo texted him when he sent her a long maudlin message about how he didn’t want to monopolize her time before her first WeHo show. _**You wanna sit in our underwear and watch reruns of your favourite show or you wanna go out and see some LA nightlife; I’m good with both! There’s just a certain special someone I want you to meet.**_

 _ **I don’t mind,**_ he replied. _**Either way don’t want a single sober moment.**_

Eric didn’t text his parents that he was going away for his birthday. They didn’t check on him as often anymore, complacency had won him a little freedom, but he still withdrew cash before he spent. Cleo bought his plane ticket. It was his birthday anyway.

He felt different from the moment he stepped out of LAX. Cleo was waiting for him on the thoroughfare amidst white sidewalks and a glaring sun that was such a gorgeous and relieving contrast to the shift of constant clouds in Berkeley. He slid into the passenger seat of Cleo’s rental SUV and couldn’t stop grinning.

“Tell me you’ve listened to the song I sent you!” Cleo squeed at him, wacking his arm playfully as she paired her phone with the car bluetooth.

Eric shrugged off his button up shirt, tossing it in the backseat as he shook his head, happy to let the skylight press hot perfect sun on his naked arms around his tank top.

Cleo turned on her music and they were soon gliding across the freeway as the jazzy funk rhythm of Gambino’s newest track filled the car and she started to sing. Eric felt deeply content; just primed and ready for a weekend of memories. He didn’t feel anxious about Cleo leaving him; not about school. He felt real and in the moment. He wanted to stretch this out for as long as possible.

“Did you get anything?” he asked her as the instrumentals swayed between them.

“Oh yeah,” she laughed, adjusting her shades. “I didn’t know what you wanted. Usually I default on weed, but this weekend is special, so we just gotta stop at my dealer’s place.”

“Ugh,” Eric uttered exaggeratedly. “You’re not sleeping with this one, are you?”

Cleo tittered and revved the accelerator. “And what’s it to you?”

“I’m not starting my birthday weekend waiting out your booty call from a dealer’s living room,” he huffed.

“First of all, you’d wait in the car. Second of all, pretty weird time to get all me, me, me after your Baby boy Eric text to me yesterday.” She set into an over the top received pronunciation English accent. “ _Oh, what if you don’t get time to yourself, Cleo; Cleo, I’m gonna be the worst this weekend. Turning twenty-one is so confusing, Cleo...don’t let me ruin it for you.”_

Eric buried his face in his hands, laughing. “Fine. Oh my god, kill me if I ever do start to sound like that.”

Cleo leaned over and bumped his shoulder with her elbow. “No,” she murmured lightly. “I just think you should be kinder to yourself.”

Something about how she said that, her butterscotch voice, smoothing across the minefield of all the things he couldn’t really explain to himself. It made him go quiet, and still. He considered it as they hit Westwood Boulevard and Cleo’s playlist was flowing into some 2011 tracks on Kid Cudi’s discography.

Maybe it was about closure. He could see Cleo off like this, knowing she was gonna be happy, knowing he could visit her anytime. Maybe he just needed this one good weekend before he employed a backbone and pushed harder with school. His trust fund was basically his by Saturday morning. He was gonna get over all of it; he was going to be okay.

“Yeah,” he mumbled, watching the storefronts gleaming under the gorgeous pinks and golds of the dusty LA sunset. “I’ll be chill.”

“I’m here for you, baby boy,” she offered candidly, distracted at a left turn. “Do me a favour and grab my phone. The first text exchange there under Cassady. Just ask if he’s home. I don’t wanna pull up to find out he’s--”

“Oh, _he_ ,” Eric teased, taking her phone and cackled when Cleo managed to change lanes while play-fighting him.

“Just text our drug dealer, you--” she managed before needing to focus on the road to avoid getting them t-boned at the next light.

Eric waited until they were safely “What kinda name is Cassady?”

Cleo burst into a spate of her heartiest laugh. “It’s a nickname; you’re so mean!”

Eric was still laughing when he hit send on his own terse version of Cleo’s missive. While waiting for a reply, he drew his finger upward. It was a lot; short ‘good morning’ texts to long threads of saying good night. Pet names. Serious stuff. _Oh_ , so she really liked this guy. This was the special someone.

The bubble under his message popped up and broke into Eric’s slow and soft realisation.

_**walk right in, beautiful.** _

Eric made an obnoxious gagging noise as he held the phone up for her to see his reply. Cleo laughed with him about it as they pulled up to the curb next to a little bungalow house with yellowing grass.

“You gonna come in with me and be normal?” she prodded, unclipping her seatbelt and hopping out the door.

“Yeah, I’m not waiting in your hot car,” he replied, grabbing his shirt, slipping it on without bothering to button it. “Plus, I wanna meet the future Mr. Cleo Amarhi.”

“ _Eww_ ,” she half-screamed as they walked up the little pebble pathway, which was the cutest, _strangest_ reaction to the suggestion she might be serious about a guy. Eric shook his head and moved for the front door but she seized his arm and lead them around the back. “I’m gonna be real with you and say that I genuinely think you two are gonna hit it off.”

Eric made his face an innocent mask and looked past her like she hadn’t said anything, which only made her laugh again as they crossed a tiny little backyard and its crumbling stone fire pit with an array of differently-sized lawn chairs. She walked confidently up to a white screen door and slid it open.

He wasn’t aware of why his stomach curled into a big knot as they entered at first because Cleo beelined in to her new squeeze standing over by the kitchen counter and Eric was distracted for milliseconds sliding the door shut behind him.

He just heard Cleo’s soft, “ _Hey_ ,” and his eyes drew listlessly across the room toward them. For one, he was still wearing his shades and it took a moment for his eyes to adjust as he pulled them off to tuck them in his tank top V. Perhaps, as well, it was because he was thinking more about the scent of the room, dry and tart with weed and something he couldn’t place--a homey kind of musk--or perhaps it was the late afternoon sun glare of the kitchen window that Eric didn’t react at first because, while Cleo had draped her arms in a familiar hug on her tall figure of a man, the figure had frozen in place and was staring right at him.

It felt like the world shrunk, closed right into a wink of a vacuum as Eric’s squint went wide-eyed at the cold recognition and the immediate drop in his heart rate before it barrelled forward, nearly killing him on the spot.

Ira had a pair of hands laid loosely on Cleo’s hips in the sweet space between her denim cut-offs and the fluorescent green fishnet under her black hooded crop top. He hadn’t moved an inch when Cleo had dropped a greeting kiss on his cheek because he was staring at Eric.

“What the hell,” Eric uttered into the silent room and Cleo looked between them, puzzled while extricating herself from Ira casually. Eric laughed a little weakly; the situation really was ridiculous; like some sort of spike of deep quelling irony.

“Hi,” Ira said, like he could really just cover Eric’s whole year of dull ache and the endless nightmare of trying not to think about him for so goddamn long; like he could really just put an end to it with his incredulous and gorgeous smile that made Eric feel worlds of a sudden all-consuming rage.

“Oh...no,” Cleo said, twisting to look back at Ira with her own incredulous smile. “He’s not--you mean your trust fund youtuber fling last year was _Eric_?! _My_ Eric?! _”_

Ira spread his arms, looking vacantly between the both of them as Eric considered for sharp seconds leaving the house, just stepping right back out because it was clear like the superimposition of all of Cleo’s beautiful assets and Ira’s words on her phone; sweet devoted Ira-isms in plainspoken poetry that Eric had glossed over before he’d passed judgement. Her special someone now, in brilliant relief, part of a secret that didn’t involve him.

“Trust fund youtuber,” he echoed, trying a smile and finding his muscles uncooperative. “Not really a youtuber anymore, though.” It came out more accusatory than he’d meant it. God, it wasn’t even Ira’s fault but… “What are you even doing in LA? What about your TA contract?”

Cleo had leaned her back against the counter, arms crossed, looking speechless.

Ira’s shoulders sagged and he made something of a helpless gesture before running a hand through his much longer hair now, curled at the ends near his neck. “I broke the contract. Then I uh... applied for a research assistant position at UCLA; the pay is better and they cover my housing--”

“When?”

“What?”

“ _When?”_ Eric could hear how he sounded; heard the stretching hurt and how cold he felt as a result. He was angry. “When did you quit Berkeley?”

Ira glanced at Cleo who gave him nothing. Eric could feel her watching him, knowing with her practiced empathy that he was seething, about to explode. Ira probably knew the same from the heady air as he hesitated to reply. The room was on pins and needles before Ira cleared his throat, and said, “I quit the week you left.”

Eric breathed out; it was meant to be just a sigh but his voice came with it; like a flinch letting go of his nerves. “I ...gave up _everything_ so you could keep that job.”

“Well, I never--” Ira began, tone coming out heated before he could stop it seemingly, but he paused, gaze dropping. “When you didn’t come back after that morning... I just…” He stopped himself again, and stared really hard at the ceiling then, mouth a pale line before he ended with, “You didn’t _have_ to do that, Eric.”

Eric turned on his heel, ripped the screen door open and walked out. He walked unsteadily, almost drunkenly like he wanted to run but the long unkempt yellow grass of the backyard slipped under his boots and he almost collided with a lawn chair. He simply collapsed on it, sitting down roughly with his hands on his knees. He had his eyes screwed shut and he was breathing evenly, in through his nose and out through his mouth. Long, sharp inhales followed by even longer soft shaking exhales.

Eric didn’t understand it; why he was so overcome. The way Ira had sounded; the way he’d _looked._ Like Eric had been the one who hurt him, as if he’d had spent the better part of a year fighting to _function,_ refusing to want his old life back so it would hurt less. And Ira had done just fine; he’d moved on, literally _moved_ and he had, by some sick and twisted act of God, found Cleo.

 _Cleo_.

Cleo was probably devastated. She had looked so happy even when he was teasing her before. He wasn’t even sure how he felt about the times he’d tried to make something happen with her or why it hurt him especially how he cared about her so much that he hadn’t been able to share more than lazy, crossfaded kisses with her. In the text message, Ira had called her beautiful because he had eyes but he couldn’t even see the reason Eric would have given him _everything._

He heard someone step onto the flat stone patio on the outside of the screen door. He turned, making sure it was Cleo. She approached slowly, looking every part as hurt for him as she often had been when he couldn’t find comfortable words to tell her what she had helped him get over.

“I should have told you,” he told her.

“Aww, Eric, no, that’s not--how would you have known?”

Eric leaned back in the lawn chair properly, so relieved to be talking. “I didn’t think it would ever come up. I was getting better and I was almost over it. It’s stupid. Don’t--” His heart sank when she came around to pull a lawn chair closer, scraping it over the dead grass until they were sitting knee to knee. “It was only for a month last year. I don’t want this to ruin anything.”

Cleo shrugged. “I had my own ulterior motives. I thought I might push you together so you’d be friends. You were gonna meet, we’d smoke a couple joints together and y’all would like each other _so much_ and we’d have a crazy weekend and you’d both come to my show on Sunday. That’s silly now. If you want to go, we can go. I have my place and we can just--”

Eric felt that was a lot more than he deserved. She would really ditch Ira--well, ditch her new boyfriend for him. “No, that’d be--listen--ugh you’re amazing, Cleo.” He reached out and smoothed a hand over her shoulder to her collar, playing affectionate fingers over her throat as she smiled at him. “You’re not even mad at me a little bit?”

Her jewelry jingled and the bracelets on her arm pressed cool on Eric’s fevered skin as she leaned over him and gave him a soft cloying kiss on the corner of his mouth, almost at the cheek but not all the way. “That’d be dumb. Friendships mean a whole lot more to me than dick.”

“Fuck,” he breathed, laughing out the ache as he twisted away. “Just wait here, all right?”

Cleo nodded, then she folded her long bare legs under herself and appeared to get comfortable pulling out her phone as he stalked off back toward the door.

He heard a brief clatter and footsteps trying, and failing to withdraw quietly. He didn’t care that Ira had seen that because then at least it would punctuate his meaning when he stepped inside and said resolutely, “Listen, I care about her. And I’d never make her choose, so you and me, we gotta stop hating each other for at least one weekend. It was a year ago, and if you care about her as much as I do, then you gotta admit with me that whatever happened with us we can sort out later along the line if you stick around.”

Ira was behind his sofa, hands gripping the back of it so hard the veins in his arms were built in sharp relief. He searched Eric’s stare for a quiet moment before he said, “I don’t...I don’t _hate_ you, Eric.”

Eric bit his lips, shoving his hands reflexively in his pockets. “Good,” he said to a space above Ira’s left ear. “That makes this easier. I saw your messages with her by accident--”

Ira straightened. “Oh _hey_ , look, we--”

Eric waved his hand, stepping back. “I don’t…” If he could, he’d step out of the weight of the images in his head. What it must be like for Cleo to be curved under him, listening to the sharded sound of Ira’s groans when they were-- “I don’t want to know the details. I was just trying to say that I can see you care about each other. Just--let’s be friends and forget everything.”

Ira’s eyebrows furrowed in that way of his, but his grip on the back of the sofa relaxed. “Friends,” he echoed. “We could try...”

“Good,” Eric said again, trying to sound firm.

Then the accusation in the words ‘ _when you didn’t come back_ ’ sank hard in his throat.

Silence dropped between them like a cold splash of water. A jarring awakening of what Eric had just committed to, now that the fight hadn’t been had and now they were looking at each other, alone in a room with only physical memories worn into the landscape of Eric trying terribly hard not to think of the way Ira’s tentative smile looked as soft as that day by the marina. When Eric thought he might have loved him.

“I guess we could go outside,” Ira said at last, his voice lighter than it had ever been between them. _Friendliness_. Fucking poison in Eric’s chest. “Wanna share a joint? For old time’s sake?”

 _Happy birthday to me_ , Eric thought.

~*~

It was a strange stutter at first.

Cleo held court as they passed around two decent dispensary pre-rolls, talking shit about the producers she’d encountered when she first hit the LA scene and it didn’t take long before Eric was laughing at her description of one guy who had tried to convince her he’d signed The Weeknd. There were lulls, and Eric was too relaxed to get anxious on this strain which meant sometimes he’d catch himself looking across the empty fire pit at Ira in the hot dusk. Something in his throat kept tugging when he thought about how he never thought he’d see him again, detached from all the aspects of his pain, Ira still had the same effect on his environment.

He wondered if Ira had even, for any moment, thought about him like that.

Questions like that aside, now that they were all sitting together, there were so many things he _didn’t_ want to touch. How Ira and Cleo met. If the words he’d used on her were at all similar; if he did that thing after he came where he curved you close to him like being near you, touching you was a part of his own language of worship; skin to skin. Instead Eric started barraging Cleo with questions about LA and refused to avoid looking at Ira when he chimed in with small details.

“I feel like LA is more your speed than mine,” Ira said at one point neutrally. Carefully. Cleo was taking a hit and didn’t reply, but Eric was just sitting there.

“You’re just missing the chill of Chicago,” he said at last. Wistful. “The cinema of cold weather is what kept John Hughes’ career in Chicago so full of magic realism,” he added; just a one-off fact spilling out of his mouth like it was attached to his first warm words to Ira.

“Magic realism is a staple of cold weather?” Ira’s lips pulled up in a bewildered smile.

Eric nodded, only tentatively registering the familiarity of this engagement between the two of them. “I just have this working theory that every successful director has a weather theme.”

Ira huffed out a laugh, a splash of smoke with it. “I noticed you use a lot of fractured light in your videos. Is your theme sunsets?”

Eric was startled, but excited. “Yes! Sunsets are the time of day when things feel clearer; cooler--you understand everything better when the sun’s going down. And unlocking secrets about the world feels less scary when everything’s still. I’m _obsessed_ with the feeling of the end of a day. Like you can _create_ a good ending when the sun starts to touch orange lines against the earth. It’s so crazy that you noticed that; you never--”

He froze. Ira watched him, but Eric was done talking. He settled back in his chair, unable to make words. For a wild moment, there wasn’t a chasm of a year between them, and for a wild moment, he was so thrilled for Ira to _see_ him like that again.

Cleo was glassy-eyed, gazing between the both of them, a small smile fixed on her face. “I wish I’d gotten to see your work, Eric,” she sighed.

“He’s a genius, Cleo.” Ira said quietly, firmly and Cleo hummed a calm agreement.

Eric opened his mouth to tell them to stop, especially Ira who had no right…

Maybe it was the weed but he didn’t say a word; it felt like the bite in him got stuck in his throat as his brain jogged to catch up with the realisation that Ira was speaking in present tense, as if their videos were still a real thing. It felt like a stinging salve and a melancholy swept over him.

“I don’t make videos anymore,” he stated softly.

“It sounds like you have talent, though,” Cleo murmured, matching his volume. “Why not start up again?”

Eric shrugged, tipping his head against the back of his chair and staring at the bare expanse of the sky, bleeding into a darker blue. “Being a youtuber feels kinda childish these days anyway; the platform isn’t for me. There’s school and, you know, marketing is kinda fun. I was thinking I might just go into advertising--”

“That’s the _stupidest_ thing I’ve ever heard.”

Eric’s head whipped up to look at Ira, shocked at the wry curve of his mouth.

“What?”

Cleo who had just finished her hit exhaled probably sooner than she wanted to. “Oh, you’ll have to excuse Neal Cassady over here, he forgets that people aren’t mind readers so he lashes out with solid gold statements like that instead of telling you how he feels,” she reported a little reproachfully.

“ _God,_ Cleo!” Ira exclaimed, his frown breaking as he looked over at her, completely abashed.

Eric immediately found himself fascinated by the flush on Ira’s cheeks right then. Cleo raised her eyebrows at Ira in a very ‘What? I’m right,’ fashion before flipping her dreads over her shoulder to pass Eric the joint.

Felt like a strange revelation. The Ira he knew being summarized so cleanly like that. Eric remembered the first time he thought Ira was angry with him, the day by the mine as he’d sourly explained the injustice of the world, openly declaring that people didn’t care about dead people; that Eric couldn’t possibly care.

“That’s an exaggeration,” Ira drawled with some amusement after their tense silence.

“You’re prickly,” Cleo replied affably, reaching out to pat Ira’s knee. “And there’s nothing wrong with that.”

Ira shut his eyes, and seemed to be trying not to smile. “I’m _sorry_ ,” he said stonily. “I didn’t mean you’re stupid; just--”

“How about we drop it,” Eric sighed. “If we keep on like this, we might end up fighting about it again when we’re drunk.”

Ira paused and Cleo cackled a little with some glee. “Oooh, Eric’s gonna get us _Lit_ ,” she sang, putting an over the top trill on the last word.

Eric’s bad mood fell apart at that and they all sat for helpless seconds, in soundless laughter; the kind that only a good high could give.

So, they dropped it; they talked about movies and Ira seemed to have no issue disagreeing with him on various points of plot. Literary devices weren’t lost on Eric, but he was annoyed to find that for every analysis he meant to offer, Ira understood it on the deepest level of its history. Cleo kept laughing at them and she told them about scores and the arrangement of Baz Luhrman’s soundtracks as its own thematic novel.

It was only as they started to burn out that Cleo stretched, halfway through a party-sized bag of doritos they were sharing, and looked over at him. “You feel like getting in some music and dancing a little?”

Eric felt one with the lawn chair at that point, but the idea of going to an LA club for the first time was too compelling. “Yeah, but I’d like to shower after sitting in this sticky heat all evening.”

“Yeah, same,” Cleo replied. “I’m all burnt out so we can go to my place and get ready. You’ll wanna change too, I’m guessing?” she offered up at Ira.

Ira paused. “I don’t know…” Eric caught the furtive glance shot his way and almost took offense.

“It’s my birthday in a few hours,” he declared imperiously. “And you’re trying to get out of celebrating with me, aren’t you?”

“ _Really,_ Ira?” Cleo exclaimed as if it were true. An old technique of hers. “On his _birthday_?”

Ira snorted. “ _Jesus_ , I’ll be right back,” he sighed with a beleaguered tone that fell flat from how obviously relieved he was.

The energy between them once so lost in the half-formed image of his memory felt oddly clearer now and Eric was a little baffled to feel relieved as well. They were past the worst of it. This was gonna work. And fuck if the drugs were gonna help, Eric was gonna have a good time tonight.

Eric realised he and Cleo had been sitting in silence for a good thirty minutes eating chips. Okay, so maybe they weren’t as burnt out as he thought. Cleo was quietly playing Candy Crush with her one non-Doritos dusted hand.

“I’m sorry we almost fought again,” he finally said. “I really don’t want this to be weird anymore.”

Cleo twisted in her seat then, looking at him like she was about to intimate a secret. “I like listening to the two of you talk...or argue. Sometimes Ira gets into this cycle of nihilism and I can’t _deal,_ but you’re so casual about it and you’re so, I dunno, curious; it’s like you two built your own world and watching you two fight about it tells me how y’all meant it to look.”

Eric scoffed. “You’re sure you’re not still high?”

“Even if I am,” she retorted with one of her giggles. “I could listen to the two of you go on about your crap for hours.”

Like half the comments on their old youtube videos.

“Why’d you call him that earlier?” he asked without thinking, hastily changing the subject. “Neal Cassady.”

Cleo was warm to her subject of roasting Ira apparently because her smile was a rare one. “Because he’s the only dealer I’ve met who quotes Beat poetry when he’s nervous. Have you heard him talk about Marilyn Monroe?”

Surprise hollowed out Eric’s insides for a moment and then they came back in a warm rush

to his chest. “Yeah, that’s--she’s his idol, I think.”

Cleo rested her cheek on her dorito-dusty hand, watching him. She seemed to come to a decision as she continued softly. “When I met him, he was wasting away like a romance heroine. I mean he described you like a man out of one of his dusty old books. Sometimes I wondered if he’d made you up because I’ll admit I did keep my eyes peeled for--how did he put it?--a soulful youtuber with beautiful curious eyes and a smile that hits as if the sunshine were a tidal wave.”

“Holy shit...” Eric murmured, shellshocked. “Um, what the fuck actually.”

Cleo snickered. “If I didn’t know any better, I’d say he’d fallen in love with you or something.”

Eric froze. How could she manage to say that without an ounce of bitterness or hurt. Cleo was not the ‘masking your feelings’ type at all, but she sounded at ease, chiding and affectionate. “No, that’s---now _that’s_ stupid. He’s always got poetry in his head; probably got it from some Ginsberg piece or something.”

“He compared you to him, too. It’s annoying how much 1930’s literature I gotta keep looking up just to _get_ him, but that’s caring about people, isn’t it?” she sighed, and Eric didn’t know why he felt so hopelessly guilty.

Maybe because he couldn’t stop the singing hope rising up out of his chest every time he thought about it; how Ira’s memory of him was so vivid, how he’d readily described him like he came with a sort of mythos, like the rest of the stories Eric had tumbled into for him.

Ira emerged some minutes later in a loose midnight blue shirt he was in the middle of buttoning, a pair of clear-framed glasses with his long hair down around his face, scooping in faint curls at the end. Eric stared and stared, breathing as shallowly as possible.

 _Happy birthday to me_ , he thought again, a new kind of misery seeping in around the first real flush of arousal he’d felt in months.

~*~

Cleo knew the bouncer, so Eric got zero hassle about it being less than half an hour to his birthday. There was a burst of the smell of dry ice as the door opened and the rumble of the bass from outside became a full furious rhythm in his ears.

“Let’s get the bar first!” Cleo called at them, the metal in her sandals clacking up the steps. She was a vision in her shorts and the gold webbing of the jewelry draped around her naked thighs . She almost immediately recognised a friend who pounced with a squeal and a hug once they reached the top of the stairs. Both Ira and Eric watched her get dragged into a throng of dancing people.

Eric went for the bar, quietly aware of Ira right behind him but dutifully ignoring the heat of his presence as he stood on the foot rest, trying to take in the back-lit display behind the bar tenders

“First legal drink,” Ira remarked, shouting over the music as he slipped in between Eric and a stranger with their back to him. ‘What’re you in the mood for?”

Eric was too excited to overthink the way Ira’s smile was a direct reminder of the way he’d once stood over him and ordered him to say it. Say that he wanted to fuck him. _God._ “I was nervous that I wouldn’t know what to order so I googled drinks and found a Buzzfeed article. I read about this one literally called a _Holy Water_!”

Ira’s mouth curved and his eyes narrowed. Eric looked away just as Ira leaned down and spoke in his ear, “Only _you_ would research the act of ordering alcohol.”

Eric forced a laugh and tried not to look around to see if Cleo had seen it, as if anyone could have seen how his skin prickled to life. Ira didn’t seem in the least bit aware that every time the person behind Eric shifted and gesticulated to their friends, Eric pressed a little too close.

Ira lifted one long arm, signaling a bartender. “Two holy waters!” he said, the spin of the lights made his eyes look like there was a battery acid gleam on them when he looked back down at Eric. “Is it okay if I buy your first drink?”

Eric swallowed. He was almost angry, but not quite. ”What are you doing?”

Ira’s brow quirked. “Just buying you a drink. It’s your birthday in--” He pulled his phone a little ways out of his shirt pocket and squinted at it. “--in five minutes. You asked me to celebrate with you, so why can’t I buy you a drink?”

Eric relented with a shrug, the blasé of it thwarted just as the bartender came back and the person behind him leapt to signal her. Eric had to grab the bar counter to keep from ploughing into Ira whose left hand gripped him around the ribs and the other closing on the space of skin just under the hem of his tank top.

Eric twisted, meaning to push Ira’s hands off him, but Ira had already let go, startling Eric with a sudden grip on his wrist. He went still as Ira leaned close, his whole frame curtained Eric, the smooth texture of his shirt brushed the exposed spaces of Eric’s skin just as his belt buckle dug like an oath against his stomach.

The music turned into a deafening roar in his ears, mixes of thumps and his heart and the heat of his own flush sweeping a curl of fever up his spine. Then the world went quieter, the thumps of the bass wittered out and the rest of the people swimming in and out of focus for him; they and their voices mingled.

Ira had dropped something in his palm. Eric looked at it. A pink and white pill. “Oh,” he said.

“That’s the molly Cleo said you wanted. Pop it before a narc sees you.”

Eric pulled away and reached for his drink as he cracked the pill open and poured the powder in his drink. He was sweating now and his whole body was singing and he was so irrationally furious with himself and with Ira. Disappointment felt like acid in his veins as he considered how idiotic it was that he thought Ira wanted to kiss him. He had to get away from him or he was going to do something really stupid.

Ira looked unruffled and as cool as when they entered while he did his as well with one hand. “To warding off demons for your birthday?”

Eric tipped his blue liquid-filled glass against Ira’s. “If I wanted to ward off demons I wouldn’t have asked you along,” he said before downing at least half of his drink.

Why did Cleo tell him any of those things? He was all fucked up now.

Eric watched the bob of Ira’s throat as he took a drink of his own, a long chug of it. When he finished, he looked down at Eric with a deeply amused and mystified expression. “When’d you get so vicious?”

Eric was speared through the middle with how much he wanted him. “When you broke my heart.”

Ira’s eyebrows flew up and for one singular moment the mask of his poetry, his silence and soft, easy-going expressions was gone. “Eric--” he began.

“Oh my god, _there_ you are!” Cleo smelled like she’d had some shots when she wrapped her arms around him. Eric hugged her like a floatation device, almost viciously and terribly glad she’d come when she had. “Happy birthday, baby boy!” she sang before kissing him. “Can we dance? It’s midnight!” she murmured on his lips.

Eric broke off the very not appropriate kiss in front of Ira, and pecked her on the cheek. He lifted his glass. “Lemme just finish this; you two go on ahead.”

She’d clearly gotten her molly ahead of time because her eyes were bright with fervour and her pupils were blown. She seized Ira’s hand in both of hers. “Gucci Mane might be here tonight. Let’s get on the dance floor!” she said to him like those two things connected somehow.

Ira was still looking down at him as he was drawn away but Eric looked down at his glass. He needed to ground himself before the molly kicked in. He only looked when he was sure they had joined the throng, expecting them to have disappeared but they were there, standing out stark in the mess of bodies.

Cleo shook her dreads back to a silent laugh from Ira, teeth flashing behind curled lips. She stepped away from him and Ira caught her hand with his free one, and let her twist until her ass was pressed up to him and she bent low while he held her hips against his. The bass dropped and Ira responded by turning her, and dipping her down. Eric leaned forward and Ira was leaning over her, grinning a bit at her surprise. Eric watched the lick of Ira’s brown hair touching Cleo’s forehead, and the way her chest trembled in her startled laugh, her lips mirroring Ira’s smile.

Eric threw back the rest of his drink, enjoying the ice and the buzz bleeding in his nerves as the music thudded at a pulse and matched the delicious ache in his breath. He drew toward them, and it was Cleo who saw him coming. She exclaimed something he didn’t catch as the DJ pushed the music to swell and the flicker lights started to put the three of them in stop motion.

It felt perfect to just dance and not think especially as the molly carded him through every touch of skin on his. He was already all pent up; so he jumped with the beat, letting his shirt slide down his shoulders and onto his arms, responding nicely when Cleo’s fingers laced with his and she started to gyrate with Ira.

There were faint flashes as the lights on the floor shot open and flickered faster in blues and oranges. Ira’s eyes were black against his skin and the journey of his gorgeous hands and fingers up Cleo’s stomach, the both of them gleaming with sweat. Eric shut his eyes and let the music control him, cathartic and clean as the thrumming beat shivered right through him. Cleo laughed in his ear and shouted something. Eric opened his eyes just in time to see a friend of hers reach for her, a petite girl with olive skin and a full head of shiny black ringlets. Cleo dropped Eric’s hand and extricated herself out of Ira’s grip before practically throwing herself into the girl’s arms.

Seemed innocuous at first as the other girl started whispering excitedly in Cleo’s ear as the beat made people careen and undulate around them. Cleo’s hands went from embracing the other girl around her shoulders to slipping both palms up her throat to her cheeks, holding her in place as she leaned in and kissed her, slowly, eagerly. Their bodies melted together and it went from a sweet greeting to something Eric felt decidedly intrusive for continuing to watch, but still he stared. The girl’s hands were on Cleo’s breasts, pretty blue fingernails curling hungrily into Cleo’s skin as the dancing throng shifted them about and into each other. Cleo opened her mouth in a breathless gasp on her kissing partner’s red lips, the smear of lip stain on her tongue as they continued to kiss messily.

Across the clear and shocking mess of it, Eric’s eyes met Ira’s. Cleo hadn’t mentioned anything about theirs being an open relationship and--wherever the drug loophole sat--Eric was, for some reason, only thinking that he was watching Ira get his heart broken in real time.

However, Ira was staring at _him_ , an expression on his face that Eric only recognised as being an exact representation of how he felt: a curious and frozen dismay. Eric frowned as Ira tilted his head curiously, a new kind of questioning smile on his mouth.

The lights were distracting, but Ira picked his away around Cleo and her mystery girl, drawing toward Eric. “Everything good?” he said, which was even more perplexing than Cleo and her companion.

“Yeah, I mean. I just didn’t know you guys were in an open thing,” he shouted over the new hum of the bass drop and the screams of the dancers in reaction.

“An open--who, _me_?” Ira shouted back. “Me and Cleo?!”

It was starting to dawn in sickening and relieving fashion. “Yeah!” he called back half heartedly. They were practically shouting in each other’s ears.

Ira gestured faintly, looking surprisingly lost and anxious. “I thought _you_ were with her! I thought you were her boyfriend!”

“No!” Eric exclaimed, hands in his hair. This was not the state to be in for this conversation. His mouth was dry already and every time Ira spoke, it was like hot splashes of breath over the short hairs under his ear. He was panting and so was Ira. “I thought you two were together! She said I was gonna meet her special someone this weekend, I--”

“No, no, like she and I hooked up a couple times when we first met, but…” Ira’s disbelieving laugh felt like a short circuit up his spine and Eric didn’t realise he was gripping a whole handful of the back of Ira’s shirt, that they were talking quieter, close enough to be normal under the power of the heady noise and the vibration of the floor under them.

“So,” Eric was staring at Ira’s lips as he spoke, dazed in their strange comfort of being next to each other again. Zero games. Just talking. “If you’re not her special someone, and I’m not her special someone, then…”

Eric’s smile spilled across his face. He recognised the phrasing. Like of course he would. The lights pounded hearty flashes around Ira’s head, silhouetting him for sparse moments and Ira’s own smile grew as Eric replied. “...then who’s driving this car?” he said laughing like he couldn’t handle it; like his heart was only just now remembering to crack in half.

Ira’s eyes crinkled at the edges, relief in every muscle of his body pressed to Eric’s. “You wanna get outta here?”

Eric nodded.

“We should tell Cleo,” Ira murmured distractedly as they hit the night air which Eric breathed in, relieved to be out of the heat. “I mean she knows everyone in this town at this rate, but I hate to leave just like that.”

“You’re right, shit!” Eric pulled out his phone to text her while they were waiting for an Uber and was surprised to see she had already texted him.

_**I s2g I’ll come back to the club before the night’s out. I want you to meet Leah but we haven’t seen each other in weeks. I texted your Neal Cassady and told him not to make you too mad.** _

He shook his head, trying to mentally map out the entirety of the evening and every moment he thought in his own head that he might have hurt Cleo, even the shared forbidden seconds by the bar. He already knew when Cleo heard about all this, she would probably laugh and laugh. He didn’t want to tell her over text because he knew her reaction was worth seeing.

_**Ira and me are going back to his place; i’ve got a story for you.** _

_**Asfdhkngjkdn OH MY GOD! i got a pretty good guess how it ends! I’ll see you guys tomo!** _

It seemed silly to voice it, but he couldn’t help thinking it as he considered what it meant that after all this time, in a whole different city, they would end up like this--especially when Ira’s hand reached across the stretch of the Uber’s backseat and closed on his thigh in an asking grip--Eric knew, with a frightened clarity, that he and Ira had been fixed on each other and they were doomed to repeat it all over again from the moment he’d run from Ira’s place last year.

~*~

When the Uber dropped them off, they got as far as the inside of the screen door because Ira grabbed his wrist, stopped him walking and when Eric turned to look at him, he saw only a very naked entreaty on his face.

They were still and Eric felt like their quiet allowed him to _really_ look at Ira, read thoughts as they played over his features and Eric felt he knew the translation for the way Ira’s mouth quirked and his eyes searched for cues, attuned to Eric’s replies. It was like speaking, he melted his hips into Ira’s hold, learned in and relaxed his weight against Ira and tipped his face up just as Ira pulled him in.

They didn’t kiss.

It was an anomaly. Eric stretched up and Ira breathed over his lips, a finite warmth seeping into the space between them. Eric shut his eyes, and Ira pressed his nose to Eric’s. It felt new and so ancient at the same time. Their smiles faded; Eric could feel it. Everything changed with this single moment like a droplet teetering on the rim of a glass.

Eric sighed, half-laughing in a vague disbelief at how punchdrunk he felt, and Ira hummed in agreement. Eric was definitely going to kiss him; like _really_ kiss him and Ira was waiting--just on the rare condition that they were sharing this single sensation that went beyond description--trembling lips beginning to move under Eric’s.

“Wait,” Eric whispered, the groan on his voice loud in the room.

Ira looked content, ready for him, eyes swimming in a wanton daze. “What?”

Eric didn’t answer at first. It was complicated, trying to compile the cold in his chest at the same time the smaller, much more fragile feeling clutching it for safety “I can’t--I don’t want to fuck this up again.”

Ira started to smile; the molly still swimming a gorgeous glimmer in his eyes. “You’re fucking perfect, Eric. I missed you so darn much--you couldn’t possibly--”

It was on those words Eric pulled away properly, withdrawing far away enough to plant himself on Ira’s couch. If he touched Ira anymore, he wouldn’t stop and the sex was going to be mindblowing, but they’d never talk about what went wrong the first time. “That’s what you say to me. I’m perfect until I’m not. Things are fine until you’re upset because I said something stupid or made some call you don’t agree with but then you’d never tell me, you just shut down--god, and then I don’t think I actually understand you anymore!”

Ira shook his head. “That’s not--” He crossed the room, then hesitated when Eric scooted to the other end of the sofa. He stopped at the arm of the sofa, resting one hand on the back and his knee on the arm. “I didn’t mean to say you were stupid. I didn’t mean half the things I said that day. I’m--”

“I know you weren’t calling _me_ stupid, Ira, I _know that._ You keep getting so angry whenever I talk about giving up my youtube channel. What’s so stupid about that?” Eric returned.

“Because _real_ passion doesn’t retire; it transforms, and shitting on the platform you used to love isn’t going to make you want it less,” Ira explained in one heated breath, his jaw suddenly set.

“Fuck you,” Eric whispered, glaring at him. “When you _know_ the exact reason I stopped.”

Ira didn’t cave; there was a new fervour in his gaze; terrible and beautiful. “Which makes it all the more _infuriating_ that you let someone else take it away from you!”

Eric sat up, fury leaping up his spine. “I didn’t _let_ anything. It was always my decision!” His high was blitzing through his veins, making the confusion all the more palpable, but he talked right through it, his inhibitions about saying the wrong thing broken by the putty of his limbs and the sharp anxiety that Ira wasn’t understanding. “You’re the one who took offense to the idea of compromise. I _wanted_ to keep doing it; I wanted to stay with you, but you told me to leave; you’re the one who shut me out so why...”

“Oh my god, I _can’t_ believe you _still_ don’t see that your art is beyond you and me; it’s _beyond_ your dad’s ultimatum. I told you that day how insulting it is to think you’d so readily give it up for money--for my stupid job, for a degree in a field you so _clearly_ hate--”

“You can’t seriously be mad at me when it’s so obvious that you’re _obsessed_ with poetry, but you keep writing papers for professors who don’t give a shit about you and giving lectures about the eastern cults that almost destroyed the fucking Beatles! I don’t see you giving up all that to write the ‘great American novel’!”

“What makes you think I ever had the luxury?” Ira looked so pale and calm. “I don’t have a handy trust fund to fall back on, or a rich dad to keep secrets from in exchange for his money!”

Eric swallowed, his shout muted in his ribs, so his next words came out strangled and shattered. “There was _nothing_ luxurious about listening to my parents assumptions about you, nothing convenient about the way they don’t listen to what I want when everything’s confusing enough! There was _no_ luxury in agreeing not to tell my dad that I was falling in love with you!”

The rising bloom of anger and frustration in Ira’s eyes seemed to seal itself like ice-crystal as he stared at Eric. “ _What_?”

“ _Fuck_ , Ira.” Eric said; his voice fighting him. He’d been yelling since the club. “You told me to leave without even really explaining why. You projected this image on me that I would stick it to my dad right away, that I was supposed to quit school and cut them off. You call me a genius and you support and understand me and no one ever--I was so ready to give everything up for you.”

Ira spread his hands, a helpless gesture, preparing to speak, but Eric cut him off.

“No, no, I get it _now,”_ he continued calmly. “That’s too much pressure. Wanting you to keep your job, wanting to keep the trust fund _and_ have it all was more about me than it was about you. You saw I wanted to escape my life just as much as you do, and for a while there, neither of us was going to, and that’s why it breaks my heart we couldn’t work that out sooner.”

Ira’s steely gaze softened, or more accurately it broke. He slumped, the entire six feet and some change of him dropped into the chair as he rested his forehead on his hand propped on the sofa’s arm. “I never meant for you to go through all that for me; you gotta understand,” Ira said sullenly.

Eric finally exhaled a proper breath, the tension in his spine unwinding as he found himself able to reply, “I think that you were mad at me because some part of you is mad at yourself for never taking a risk for your passion.”

Ira swore, but not with any venom. It was a release. “Fuck, you’re ...right,” he admitted slowly, with great pain. “I expected you to just come right back, like I waited and waited and just got angrier with you...how stupid.”

Eric shrugged halfheartedly. "And _you_ were right about me. I do want to make videos again...I was just afraid of doing it without you." It all seemed perplexing now. They really had shouted themselves back to normal. “God, what would have happened to us if we’d fought like this that very day?” he asked philosophically, which made Ira draw into a calm contemplation, the same as his.

Silence sat between them; this time not so jarring or cold. Now that the adrenaline of shouting and feeling so bared in his own twisted feelings, Eric was aware he was still rolling. In a way, it had made things feel so much simpler; dirtier in a way he could piece out the particles of his love for Ira.

Ira turned suddenly, twisting in his spot on the other end of his secondhand chesterfield. Eric was shocked at the expression on his face; it was pale and frightened. “If I fight for you from now on, will you fight for me? Even when it’s not easy, when I forget to tell you how I feel or can’t make the words for it?”

Eric’s heart constricted. He felt a deep well of turmoil at the thought that Ira didn’t know the answer was yes, but that was part of it in the end. That he would have to keep telling him in just so many words as well. “I’d fight you in any lifetime,” he swore.

It wasn’t until Ira’s eyebrows quirked, a cut of dyed-in-the-wool humour and incredulity. Eric clapped his hand over his mouth just as Ira burst out laughing, arms around his stomach, head against the back of the sofa type of laugh. Real as anything and Eric’s favourite damn sound.

“I definitely didn’t mean that,” Eric got out, tears leaking out the corners of his eyes.

“No,” Ira wheezed, turning to him with a weak gesture of beckoning. “No, I like it. Let’s just fight each other in every lifetime. Fight and argue until we’re okay again.”

Eric closed the distance between them, flushed to his roots but lost in his helpless voiceless giggles. A sleek and calculated maneuver that it became so Eric slid easily over Ira and he braced himself, one palm to the sofa by Ira’s head.

Eric had looked down at him from this vantage so many times what felt like years and years ago. He had somehow become used to Ira’s hair being short, thick and cut it in odd places though it had been, now it was all over his head and Ira’s gaze, full and unlying; now looked more decisive. Maybe it was a year of separation, maybe it was the molly, but they went so deeply, intently quiet at the contact of Eric sitting on him.

Eric smiled despite himself, waiting as Ira’s hands scooped up the side of his thighs and rested firmly on his hips, his fingers fitting in an invisible groove there; a wordless space Eric felt he’d reserved for the press of Ira’s fingers particularly.

“Uh oh,” Eric murmured, but he flexed his thighs just as Ira’s palms smoothed along his tailbone.

Ira’s smile was impish and his whole body was warm against Eric, chest to thundering chest and the softness of his stomach under fine fabric. Eric reached up, pushing the tousled tuft of hair out of Ira’s eyes.

Eric looked at those glimmering dark eyes and leaned in, feeling Ira’s smile forming over his mouth, sucking lightly over the skin under his bottom lip, and he made a sudden pleading sound at the sweep of Ira’s tongue. Eric smiled at the very vulnerable hum Ira made under his lips; at the way his throat rumbled with a low, caustic and happy noise when Eric nibbled faintly. Ira curled his fingers tighter over Eric’s thighs, leaning his head back. Finally.

“I remember,” Eric groaned, exhaling the words because his voice was properly gone then. “You wanted to fuck me into your bed that night…”

Ira growled then, hips riding up and the sofa creaked when they made contact. The full shape of Ira’s erection in his jeans touched along the space behind his balls. Eric reached down, under himself, touched fingers along the taut denim around it. God, he’d forgotten how big he was. Or he hadn’t, but there was no simulating the _feeling_ of that.

“Do you still want to fuck me?” he prodded, savouring the way Ira looked at him, worshipful and slack-jawed.

“You fucking know I do,” Ira breathed.

Eric’s gasp hitched and Ira’s mouth hovered over his, eyes slipping shut when the friction singed the both of them. They both groaned in nearly the same timbre, and Eric’s fingers dove into Ira’s hair. It was surreptitious when Eric started to rock into it, edging himself in circles. “Then fuck me already.”

It became a vicious hungry blur and Eric wouldn’t have wanted it another way with the plainspoken separation they’d had. Ira’s soft tentative touches became clenched fingers ripping his shirt off his shoulders. Their paces matched with the way Ira grabbed him, lifting him off so he could get to his feet. He physically crowded Eric toward his room.

It was just the perfect sort of rough and needy, not wanting to let him go for even a second--Eric couldn’t be sure because Ira was all over him the next second, the threads of his tanktop snapping as Ira yanked it. Cotton sheets clung to every molly sweat-damp spot on the both of them.

Once Ira ripped his jeans down, Eric gripped the underside of the headboard as Ira grabbed his ankles and pushed them so Eric was practically folded double. Ira’s brown hair was all tendrils over his face, seeming a ghost-thing, mouth descending to rove over Eric’s chest, tongue touching a heated scrape over his nipples. Eric scrambled, trying to keep his breath as he curved a palm over his own dick, watching Ira’s eyes hood, mouth twisting, lust-drunk on him.

Fingers touched right in him, this time slick after Ira got his hand in the bedside drawer. Eric groaned, arching his back and digging his toes into the bedding to anchor himself to something because there was nothing else but the endless stretch and burn of Ira filling him up.

Eric’s back curved and Ira nipped at the back of his knees, breaths shuddering out of him as he watched Eric start to tug himself off trying to match rhythms. Ira rubbed him right inside, fingertips hot, singeing through with lube getting all over, smeared on fingers and over Eric’s thighs and Ira’s mouth licking just the very tip of his dick before pressing three fingers deep, too soon shoving to the knuckle like he couldn’t wait.

Eric loved the pain as his hips shuddered into his own palm. “Fucking _hurry_ , I don’t care. I want it to hurt. Just wanna _feel_ you,” he was sobbing, mouth slack as Ira gripped the very muscles of his ass, pressing his thighs to the backs of Eric’s just as he lifted himself in.

“God, I missed your filthy mouth,” Ira hissed, pushing Eric’s ankles up further and Eric wasn’t able to utter even the faintest sound, as his hand sped up and the silky wet burn of Ira thrusting right into his core, stretching him before the hard snap of his hips had Eric growling against the back of his own wrist.

“‘S that good?” Ira demanded.

Whatever Eric thought to say next was lost completely, turning into a drawn out mess of vowels as Ira did _something_ , something that involved a rocking motion so very deep. It was making it hard to think; he managed to get his other arm up to grab Ira around the nape, which gave him just enough leverage and pause to drag in a shaky breath of humid air. He could feel him in his fucking stomach.

“God, you’re so good at that,” Eric gasped in pitched tones, blind in moments of a crazy reeling shock-delicious coming from inside him when Ira rocked faster.

Ira’s reply was a blown out whimper, pressed right against the inside of Eric’s leg as he started to ride into Eric. His hips rocked like he wouldn’t stop, body taut as he slammed Eric into the mattress, hard enough that Eric had to hang on or he’d be crushed against the headboard.

Ira groaned, hissing before his hand curved around Eric’s thigh, blunt nails biting. It skimmed him with enough pain that Eric’s hand on himself clenched tighter and the head of his cock started to twitch through his fingers as he bounced from the drive of Ira’s hips.

He got caught up in it, his whole frame screaming for it, Ira all around him, damp and delicious. The angle made Eric feel completely full, driven to stretching, tendons all at frayed edges even as it hurt to rock into it. He shuddered up against his own sticky palm and Ira’s breathless kisses whenever Eric could get his own knees to his chest.

Ira made a noise of weak questioning, still rocking in, thighs spread and body curved over Eric. Eric nodded, mouth opening and he could make only another mess of a noise, fucked out before he felt his senses toss him and pull him inside out, mind soaring to depths as Ira fucked him through it in mind-numbing pulses.

That had definitely not been enough prep, but Eric was shaking in delirium, marvelling how it hurt so good and Ira’s one moment of empty hunger fixed on him.

Ira took him there so fast, though, each roll of his hips lighting up Eric’s insides like a million tiny sparks. By the time he was on the edge he’d given up entirely on being quiet, sobbing to himself and spitting curses as he writhed and let his dick drag across Ira’s stomach because he was so close. He swore something filthy and slurred as he came, shivering from head to toe, Ira squeezing his ankles harder, pushing him harder into the mattress to stop his squirming and Eric loved it.

Ira finally choked out another dizzy gasp and his body tensed before the snap of his hips slowed to a disjointed, but more intense rhythm. He shuddered through it in rolls of his hips that savoured as he began to whisper faint, crooning things while Eric tried to keep his breath, shivering in aftershocks and burning muscles that were already giving out.

“Come for me,” Eric begged; he wanted to feel it and Ira responded with a drawn out plea. Eric wrapped his arms around him, panting, knowing that was how Ira liked it, letting the course of Ira’s orgasm shudder right against him. He got it; he understood. He wanted to absorb heartbeats, melting, exhausted breaths, everything.

~*~

They both must have passed out because there was cool lube still stuck to his thighs and Eric’s come was properly dried on his stomach. Half-asleep though Eric was at the moment, arms full of Ira on top of him, he unconsciously started to play with the hair at Ira’s nape, feathers that would’ve put him to sleep. Ira, all wrapped around him, hummed the words against the skin of Eric’s naked shoulder,

“I had a dream about you.”

Eric barely got out a sound in his chuckle. Yeah, his voice was totally gone. “What happened?”

“It was about us,” Ira said, hot sticky breath into Eric’s arm. “But it wasn’t us.”

Eric’s eyes sagged shut again, too comfortable, though vaguely aware they were such a mess together. “Hmm?” he prompted lazily.

Ira’s window was cracked and there was a nice headwind feathering a rich breeze in the room. It smelled like campfires.

“We were older; it was weird. We were walking through a dark, dusty place and you turned and just smiled at me; it was your smile that woke me up…” Ira’s breathing slowed and Eric smiled, nudging him.

“Why would my smile wake you up? Was it creepy?”

Ira made a sluggish, snuffling noise before he continued, “Not the smile. I woke myself up because I missed the real you.”

Eric shook them with his laugh, hopelessly happy even in a damn molly crash. He kept smelling camp fires. Maybe when they woke, Ira could build a little fire in his backyard, try some acid again, and try to come up with a great comeback for their youtube channel. Eric still had the old video files somewhere on his old laptop back at Berkeley after all. If it took one video at a time, they were going to make the life they wanted.

“What a stupid fucking dream,” Ira whispered, curling his arms tighter around Eric when Eric’s fingers went still in his hair. “The you in my dream didn’t know I love you.”

Eric kept his eyes shut, waiting for the next wave of sleep to hit. He was twenty-one. He had Ira. He didn’t have to worry about anything just now. They were going to fight for each other and with each other in every lifetime.

“You should go back to sleep,” Eric murmured. “You should tell him.”

**Author's Note:**

> PSA from a former recreational drug user: Don't actually ever do LSD or PCP. the chances that it might fuck up your brain permanently in ways even years of therapy can't fully undo is too high. The others mentioned in this fic, I say just be safe about it. Be around people you trust and only from a source that you trust.


End file.
